


but you'll never break

by dantiloquent



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - How to Get Away with Murder Fusion, Commitment Issues Maybe, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, M/M, Mentions of Sex, Murder, Panic Attacks, Slow Burn, mention of drugs, suicide of minor character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 15:25:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dantiloquent/pseuds/dantiloquent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Dan knows what he’s doing all too well. In two minutes, Phil’s eyes are startled and intrigued, two bottle caps in the dark with their edges glowing, the gaze of a doe who is enticed by her own death; Dan has him flustered and jealous in five, has the guarantee of a set of emails that are definitely fishy, I tell you in seven; thirty minutes pass and he has Phil taking him home to his flat."</p><p>(htgawm au where dan is a (probably demiro) law student with maybe some commitment issues, and phil is a flustered computer nerd who helps said law student break said law)</p>
            </blockquote>





	but you'll never break

**Author's Note:**

> even if you haven't watched how to get away with murder, this should make perfect sense as it revolves largely around dan and phil's relationship; i've also added a few little snippets of info of the background plot to help you out!! sorry in advance for the fact that the whole murder plot is barely concluded or talked about, you'll have to watch the show for that.  
>  **this is based off htgawm, so there is a suicide of a minor oc, and a murder, and the subsequent panic attack. please watch out for that, and avoid anything that makes you uncomfortable!!**  
>  a massive thanks and shout out to my pals ben, megan, and fizza for reading this over for me!! (i've barely read over this so if anything's spelled wrong or is lq, sorry. also everyone who knows me knows anything romance/sex related makes me die so this was. interesting for me to write lmao.)  
> i hope you enjoy, and if you have any questions or praise come on over to [my tumblr!!](dantiloquent.tumblr.com)

_part 1, in which a student at the university is found to be a victim of murder; the victim, lila stangard, was a student of sam keating, husband of law professor annalise keating; annalise introduces her students to the trophy - their immunity idol - and the side of law no one knows about_

-

The first time, it’s for the trophy: _pride, achievement, recognition._ Annalise needs proof their client didn’t commit murder, first of all, and a reason to hire Dan, and Dan is convinced he knows how to get both. Plus, he’s never been to this place before - tonight’s a chance to enjoy himself. 

Swanning into the bar, his best suit grapples at his elbows and grips his neck, but that doesn’t matter because he’s already reaching out for two glasses of something cold and alcoholic. The lights spark purple and pink, there’s a hemic flush in the air from too many bodies, but he’s used to this, to pushing and dancing and grinding and letting all concerns fly out the window - because if you don’t release them, they will come hurtling back. And they will throttle you.

Dan chooses him for the same reason he chooses anyone: looks. The guy’s pretty on the eyes, no doubt - with a strong jaw and a soft smile and haphazard hair - but something else catches Dan’s eye, too, so that he doesn’t carry his gaze on to the next one who comes along. There’s a kind of repaired ease in his eyes and in the slope of his shoulders; his clothes complement his body shape, but it is clearly not deliberate; there belongs a kind of vulnerability and understanding in his expression as he scans the bar. He’s tugging at his sleeve cuffs and shoving his glasses up his nose and definitely not looking in Dan’s direction, something that only entices him further. And with his own body heavy from boredom and omitted noise, Dan needs a distraction. 

He nods to himself. In this club full of discord and dissent (the song is playing in E flat, he hazards a guess), he is composed and his plan constructed. He twists on his heel, his shoes squeaking a note of complaint, and goes to the bar; the next time he looks to this stranger, Dan is approaching him, a cocktail hooked in his right hand.

“One Maker’s Manhattan,” Dan announces, waving the drink in front of his eyes with a flourish. “Two cherries.” 

(Plus, this stranger works at the advertising agency - in IT - and has everything Dan needs to get this evidence.)

“Uh…” The stranger gives an awkward laugh and averts his eyes, as if declining the offer. Shrugging, Dan lets it slide a few centimetres over the table so it sits at the root of his knuckles. 

“Forgive me,” Dan says to him, with suavity and a hidden prickle up his spine, and steps over and rests a hand on the table. He can feel the vibrations of IT guy’s nervous tapping under the pads of his fingers. IT guy starts, turns his head suddenly; his eyes focus on Dan’s and the lights flare with the song change, casting their faces in an oily red. “But I see that you’re alone, and so am I. Perhaps we would be the perfect company for each other?”

“Oh,” he says; Dan just raises his eyebrows. He laughs, lowers his head and shakes it simultaneously. Dan’s grin stretches across his face, wide and blinding. The apprehension dissipates as it always does. “That’s good of you.”

“Not really. I’ve heard I’m not very likeable.” He leans in close to say this - not quite whispering, just letting the words fly from the tops of his lungs. 

Squinting his eyes - his cheek wrinkles as he smiles - IT guy says, “You’ll do,” making Dan laugh loudly, head almost thrown back. 

“I’m Dan. I work at the bank across the street.” The lie is haphazard, with minimum thought put into it; he’ll discard it as soon as the night is over.

“Phil.” A tension in Phil’s shoulders now dissipates as Dan again leans in, hip against the edge of the table. “Have you been here before?”

“No.” Dan smiles again, shakes his head. “So, you work at the advertising -”

“At the advertising agency, yeah.”

“Cool.” Dan’s listening amicably, raising his eyebrows and only letting his lips slide into a slight smile. 

“Not really.” Phil huffs a laugh. “I work in IT.”

“IT?” Dan gives a nod of appreciation. “No, IT is really fucking cool.”

“Really?” Phil presses, eyebrows raised as he represses a grin.

“Absolutely. I’m impressed, to be honest; I just click on things until they work.”

Phil laughs properly this time, his fidgeting fingers coming to a rest on the table - leaving the vortical pattern he was tracing unfinished.

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

“I’ll go get you a drink,” Dan answers, lets a hand rest on Phil’s side for a second as he adds, “Another one.”

-

Dan knows what he’s doing all too well. In two minutes, Phil’s eyes are startled and intrigued, two bottle caps in the dark with their edges glowing, the gaze of a doe who is enticed by her own death; Dan has him flustered and jealous in five, has the guarantee of a set of emails that are _definitely fishy, I tell you_ in seven; thirty minutes pass and he has Phil taking him home to his flat. An algorithm, settled into his head; the idea of intimacy toying with Phil. A taxi ride home, Dan’s fingers skipping over Phil’s knuckles. The song is E major.  
-

“How do you know of these emails, anyway?” Dan asks from Phil’s shoulder, fingers clawing on the back of the sofa as he leans over him, breath too heavy on his neck. Phil’s typing is incessant and it’s driving him crazy; he could be done and gone by now, normally. He’s not really sure why he’s not driving Phil to work faster - or why he’s still here at all. 

Phil laughs nervously, lightweight, and pushes his glasses up on one side with a busied, mislaid hand. His eyes flicker to Dan before he settles them back onto the laptop screen, clears his throat. “I hack into my boss’ emails for fun.”

Dan snorts. “Of course you do.”

Phil rolls his eyes. A moment passes, he looks to Dan and back again, and his hands pause on the keyboard. “What I don’t get is why you want them so bad,” he states, daring to look at Dan askance.

Dan frowns. “How’d you mean?”

“You’re willing to seduce me to get them.” Phil shrugs, turning back to his laptop. The screen is a convoluted mess of text and blue on his lap, and Dan looks away - doesn’t try to understand. “That means you’re desperate.”

Dan scoffs with the curl of his smile. He sways his shoulders and looks to the ceiling as he searches for an answer. He could list reasons, of course, of why Phil isn’t exactly a sacrifice - or he could move the conversation along. He drops back down to Phil’s ear, “Now is not the time to be smart, Phil. Kindly shut your mouth.”

“I doubt you’ll be so adamant about that later.”

Dan drops to his knees. Presses his forehead into the sofa cushion. Rolls his eyes, even though Phil isn’t watching. “Too smart for me,” he decides, sighing; as he uses Phil’s shoulder to push himself back up to standing, he adds, “May as well go home,” and starts to leave.

Phil’s hand catches the hem of his shirt. When Dan faces him, his confident facade drops away, Phil’s steady, sure gaze rips his own apart. “No.” Phil lets go. Just. His arm rests on the edge of the couch, hand dangling. “Don’t.”

-

Finally, Phil gives him the emails, printed on the last of his plain paper; he hands them to Dan in a pile that’s skewed in his hands, along with an exhale as he fixes his smile. As Dan shoves them into his bag - he’s surprised he even managed to remember to take it with him - he doesn’t even give them a once-over. 

And then Phil catches his waist again and kisses him, and both of them are, apparently, happy to forget any questions Phil had. 

-

The apartment is well decorated and shoved into a high corner of the city: a jut of concrete, next to a shopping centre, with lines of windows and rickety fire escapes. It’s all easy, simple. In the open space that makes up the main living quarters, there’s a cream vase that shudders when Dan takes one backwards step too many; the shadows lie, light and content, on walls of diluted blue. Pictures framed with wood and glass: pictures of a magazine cover, a sunrise stitched with cloud, and an unnamed Monet. The sofa, also, is a dark grey that slots in with a half-hearted colour scheme, and gets in the way twice as they press against each other, resulting in stumbles and a dissected dance. 

The rain Phil warned him about in the taxi home has arrived in blunders and wind-swept blusters, the sound melting down around them.

“Your decor is nice,” Dan mumbles - not that he would know, or care, because his fingers are pushing between the buttons of Phil’s shirt and he’s busying himself with the question of _just how badly can I forget myself now and still remember I’m alive in the morning? (Read: it doesn’t matter. There is nothing to lose but the bruises bound to appear on your skin. Their reality will fade and yours with it.)_

“Stop pretending you care,” says Phil, surprisingly combative seeing as he’s curling into Dan’s touch. 

“What do you mean?”

“Do you always ask that?” Phil sighs against him. “Just. Stop distracting.”

Dan smiles - the best he can do, considering - and complies.

(The blinds in the bedroom are broken: the slats are slowly falling away from each other in uneven steps, as if deterred. Upon entering, Dan tells Phil, “Your blinds are broken,” and Phil replies, “Good to know you’re paying attention.” Dan takes the hint.)

-

“Won’t you stay?” Phil asks from the bed, pretending not to watch as Dan struggles to loop his arm through his other shirt sleeve.

“No,” Dan says. And, normally, he’d leave it there, but something is leading him to say “sorry” and he doesn’t know why. But Phil’s hands lie in his lap like heretofore, legs crossed, so he chooses to leave it there, balancing between them on copper wire. Follows it with a smile deep-set in his right cheek. 

Phil nods, unhooks his legs. Once they’re ready, they trail from the bedroom to the front door, with Phil not bothering to turn on most of the lights as they go. Phil’s still wearing odd socks and Dan wants to laugh.

“Thanks for the emails,” Dan says as he bends over his shoes, tying the laces. (“What are all the zips for?” Phil asked when he kicked them off at the door. Dan didn’t reply.)

“No problem.” Phil’s leaning against the nearby wall: arms crossed, one ankle hooked over the other, and his eyes squinting because he left his glasses in his room. There’s a silence - Dan fiddling with a knot, Phil studying a spot on the wall calculated to be a centimetre above Dan’s head - and Phil hesitates before diving into it. Head first, flailing limbs tied to his chest. “So is this hacking part of the deal, or do I get this free?” Phil waves a hand at his neck, to the withering purples and blues that bleach the skin there, before thinking better of it. He flushes red, but perhaps it is merely the light.

Dan glances up. “I guess we’ll have to see.” Dishevelled, his hair falls in his eyes when he makes one last effort to get his shoe on. He succeeds, and adds, “It depends what happens in the future.”

“Who are you really?” One of his knees is bent halfway, the whole sole of his foot glued to the wall, and when he turns his head to look at Dan, his gaze is slick and his mouth firm.

Dan responds with “What?” before thinking it through. Just as he stands, his vision swims in a haze of black - before focusing. There are holes drilled into the walls where frames used to hang before they were carted off to alternate corners of the house; the air smells of the mint candles that lazily line a bookshelf.

When Phil crosses his arms again, he surreptitiously tugs at the collar of his shirt - hastily pulled on, creased at the elbows and the space just below his heart. “You’re not a banker.”

He won’t look away.

Dan smiles with lips that run with bitten red, and laughs sharply through his nose. “I’m not a banker,” he agrees with a nod of his head.

“Right.”

The nail scratches on Dan’s palm, from when they couldn’t quite hold hands, seem indelible, but Dan knows they will disappear in a week, and he rests on this as he reaches for the door. “See you, then.”

“Wait.” For some reason, Dan does, the pads of his fingers barely grazing the brass of the handle.

“Mhm?” He plans not to look back, but he fails. (The wind is knocking at the walls and racking the space between his ears. They are both so tired.)

“So what _are_ you, then?” Phil’s lip twitches.

There’s no harm in answering, Dan decides, and the wind won’t wane and the swell of his lips won’t languish quite yet, so he says, “Law student.”

Phil appears to process this for a second. Next:

“Trying to impress the professor, I see.”

“Err…” Dan trails off, ducking his head and fixing his fingers over the handle. “I’ll be off, now. Anything else?”

Stepping forward, Phil kisses him once more - swift, not enough force for him to feel it after; Dan’s spare hand settles in the limbo on the way to Phil’s waist, fingers furling like claws. “Nah.”

Dan raises his eyebrows. “Right.”

He’s almost waiting for one more lingering prevention. There isn’t one, so Dan throws the past few hours away as he steps out of the door and into the abandoned hallway outside. The steps echo on his way down and the light misses the corners, so he keeps his gaze to his feet, doesn’t breathe out through his mouth. 

-

_part 2, in which annalise’s client is revealed to have killed his first wife; the group need to prove he didn’t kill his second; meanwhile, annalise grows suspicious of sam’s involvement with lila, and agrees to represent rebecca, a neighbour of wes’ who is accused of lila’s murder_

-

The second time, it’s eight AM, just before law school. Rivulets of sweat, hot and clammy, sloping down his back and gluing his hair to his forehead, his skin shining with it as he cracks a smile that’s so deeply cut into his face it’s like a scar. A bathyal emptiness in his chest. And the lust. The smell of mint. 

“Did you run all the way here?” Phil doesn’t try to keep the confusion out of his voice as Dan pushes past him, and he leaves Dan standing alone in the middle of the living room as he tugs on the bottom of his shirt in abstracted anticipation.

“Yeah. Take off your clothes.”

“I’m about to go to work,” Phil says, hopeless as he points to the door, “and I’m worried you’re addicted to sex.”

Dan scoffs as Phil continues, “I read a book about it, it was really interesting -” 

Despite everything, Dan almost wants to laugh, to stop and tell him just _how_ nerdy that is, but he doesn’t. “Let’s not turn sex into a bad thing.”

“I’m not, I’m not, I’m just saying, can’t we do something normal, like do the crosswords, or have breakfast, or whatever it is normal couples do…” Phil trails off. 

“Couples?” Dan says, mouth wide open like a broken china doll, eyebrows raised towards his hairline. “What’s next, change our relationship status on Facebook?” He sounds confident as he takes a step forward, but there’s a shard of heartbreak in his chest and a panic writhing in his stomach. It all happens so fast. “I meet your parents?”

Phil ducks his head. He tries to laugh it away, but Dan’s closer now, and still advancing, and he can see how the apprehension fails to take flight off his shoulders. “Okay, whatever, but please ignore what I just said,” he pleads, “I know we’re not -”

“Watching you freak out is way more fun,” Dan replies. 

They’re both laughing, in a twisted way, but Dan can still feel the clamour he’s powerless against. 

(A constant gnawing at the back of his skull, muttering _this is what happens, this is what happens._ “Like I haven’t been told before,” Dan replies - silently, through the gaps in his smile.)

-

“Hi,” Dan says, the door of 303 opening and Phil taking its place. He lifts his hand, lets it drop back down.

Tentatively, Phil says, “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“No, yeah, I know. I didn’t call, sorry.”

“Thought you’d forgotten you even _had_ my number,” Phil replies, and it isn’t quite a mutter but Dan doesn’t acknowledge it, just adds another _sorry_ to his greeting. 

“No worries,” Phil supposes, while his hand trails farther down the door frame. “What do you want?”

“I need you to find something for me.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“I don’t know. Not yet. But I know whose computer you need to hack.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.” Dan throws his gaze around him, pulling his shoulders into his body. “Can I come in, please? I’m intimidated by the guy in 297.”

Phil grins despite himself, shaking his head and stepping aside.

-

Today, the apartment holds the aroma of spice and cinnamon sticks in its cupped palms - the candle burns on the shelf behind the TV, its flame flickering on the wall beside it; heat swells out from the kitchen; sunlight trips through the window frames. Half of him wishes it were darker. The dark rests on his chest with ease.

“You can sit down, you know,” Phil says over the tapping of his fingers on the keys, nearly taking out Dan’s eye as he leans back. Instead of berating him, Dan laughs.

“I like to see what you’re doing.”

“You don’t understand any of it.”

“...Okay,” Dan admits, lifts a hand, “Maybe I don’t. But there’s no harm in learning, right?”

“Hmf.” Phil’s forehead furrows as he returns his attention to the screen. Dan slumps his weight back onto the sofa, fingers tapping on its frame.

“You found anything yet?” Dan asks after a minute - his knees digging into the carpet and his fingertips feeling a slight, numbing chill. 

“No,” Phil replies. “You know, um, I normally require dinner before I agree to hack into some rich old lady’s computer.”

Straightening up again, Dan leans forward, says “Wednesday.”

“What?”

“Dinner. You and me.” Dan gives a decadent smile, lets it consume him as Phil looks around with confusion pasted in the creases of own.

“I-” Phil puffs out his cheeks. “Right, sure.”

“And the faster you type -”

“Don’t.”

Dan barks a laugh. “Wow, okay.”

“Shut up, please?” Phil exhales, trying to jab Dan with a flailing elbow, but - predictably - failing. “Next time, I’m making you sit next to me.”

“Oh?”

Phil explains, “That way I can make you shut up,” and Dan’s eyebrows raise even higher as he opens his mouth to retort. “That’s exactly what I’m on about,” Phil cuts in. Dan acquiesces. 

-

Dan's bones are made of glass and Phil's of paper - pliant, gentle, stricken with bends. All it takes is for Dan to press lightly at Phil’s elbow for Phil to fold under his touch. And Dan likes people like this, under his thumb, under his control; the small ounce of it he has, anyway, scavenged half way through the second term of college. Though, Dan is wrapped around Phil's finger as much as Phil is around Dan's - at least, that's what Phil tells him, (in less words); voice heavy and rough; Dan's hair caught around his knuckles and his breath nicking the skin at Phil’s neck.

-

The evidence works, the case is won by Annalise, and everything evens out - Dan’s contribution well recognised, of course, even if Michaela questions him and his methods with an overt sense of annoyance that pulls down at the lines on her forehead. Dan laughs, shrugs it off. 

The victory isn’t achieved without Dan missing their dinner on Wednesday. Dan’s fingers drum tangled peace treaties onto his side as he prays for Phil to _pick up the damn phone, loser_ \- “boyfriend drama?” Michaela asks; Dan ignores her - more concerned that he’s hurt Phil than he is about missing the other possible plans for the evening. The stupid take away bag he’s picked up from the nearby vendor cuts crimson into his palms, his shoes are scuffed and his hair unfixed and overwrought, but it’s nothing that can’t be sorted without turning up at Phil’s apartment and cocking his eyebrow - even if Phil’s door is slammed in his face the first time around. 

-

Dan visits Phil a number of times in the following weeks, each time with a decreasing amount of apprehension. His excuse is always, first and foremost, that they need new evidence, (“we need your computer whizz skills, Phil, please,”) but as time goes on, it becomes less and less important that Dan uses their police force odysseys as an excuse - they get used to each other, Dan gets used to having Phil as someone he can visit without an illicit reason. And he thinks back to Phil’s question, that first night, and perhaps he doesn’t know the nature of their deal, but the deal is irrelevant. The deal is muted, the relationship unstable but existent enough that Dan smiles, too, when Phil opens the door.

A drug dealer who needs to prove the long-term animosity between him and his boss; a DNA match that didn’t exist six hours earlier; an innocent girl accused of kidnapping and suffocating her boyfriend, when in reality it was one of the girls he was cheating on her with. Phil’s involved in each case - from the sidelines, never directly involved, Dan ensures this. The Keating Five knows Phil exists, of course, knows that Dan isn’t finding this information himself, but they couldn’t tell him from Adam - and nor could anyone at court, nor anyone who read the case reports.

“You could just email me, you know,” Phil reminds him one time. Dan’s tearing junk mail into skinny strips and letting them fall into the pile, just left of his crossed ankles on the table top. 

“We both know why I still come here,” Dan says; tone blunt and upfront, meaning less so, but it is clear enough that Phil’s smiling cheeks blush.

-

Dan realises - and the realisation is harsh, sudden, it must be said, but it also rests with its elbows dug softly into serendipity - that while the sex suits them fine, they’ve also bonded as friends. More so than anyone else Dan’s done this with. (He’s never done this before. The word _friends_ runs away when the lights are low, but is always nestled on the wing of his shoulder for when he awakens.) 

Which is why Dan takes to insulting Phil (sending a smile to soften the blow) instead of flirting with him; why he teases Phil for his odd socks; why he asks after Phil’s music taste when Phil’s lips are at his collarbone, because he catches sight of a vinyl on the bookcase - folded away into a corner, blushing in the low light.

Phil pinches the hair falling in his eyes and pushes it away, squinting in the direction of Dan’s gaze; he breathes out, ragged, soft, and says, “I don’t actually listen to those records. I don’t have a gramophone, or anything.”

“I thought the point of buying vinyls was that you have a record player, _Phil_.”

Phil sits back so he’s sitting on the back of his shins. “I like looking at them. They make me feel… _powerful_.” His wry grin is followed by a raise of his eyebrows.

Dan breathes a laugh, it just catches in his teeth. “That’s nice, Phil, but you’re meant to like the sound of them.”

As he rolls his eyes, Phil pushes Dan back down with one cool, gentle hand, brings his lips back to Dan's jugular but not before adding, "Spotify is a friend of mine."

"You're a slave to capitalism," Dan retorts. 

_Maybe we could listen some time, I need to show you this band,_ Dan doesn't quite say. (He never stays.)

-

"Maybe it's a metaphor," Dan says. He moves to rest on his other arm. The smell of Phil’s candles has linked arms with the tainted scent of sweat - Dan’s brow is glazed with it, sticky and cool on the high points of his cheeks, curling the ends of his hair. "For your life."

Phil swats at Dan’s hand to stop him playing with a loose thread in the duvet - doesn’t withdraw his hand, just holds onto Dan’s wrist, tightly. Dan doesn’t want to know what Phil thinks might happen if he lets go. "What is?"

"Your unprecedented vinyl addiction."

Phil rolls onto his front, offering up a disingenuous smile that shines in the corners. "How come?"

"Well,” Dan explains, “you're a dumb twat who misses the purpose of things. For starters."

There’s a catch of silence, before Phil sighs outwardly, pressing his chin deep into the mattress. "It's only been three hours, Dan. Couldn’t you have waited before insulting me?"

“Sorry.” Dan half-smiles; his gaze trails up to the windows, where Phil’s mini menagerie of cacti are contently highlighted in subtle curves of shadow (“ _it became a menagerie, Phil, as soon as you named them._ ”) The lamplight falling from above and behind is soporific, wrapping around his arms and the dip of his chest - beguiling, colubrine. A sudden idea springs on him, and the way his head fumbles and trips over his new-found exhaustion is an aberration he’s used to taking in his stride, so he says it, "I like the look of you. You make me feel... _powerful_." He’s mocking. They both know it.

"Ugh, I do not."

"You're right," Dan concedes. "But I only had to look at a guy to get you fawning over me."

"Don't." Phil hides his face in one of the many, many pillows that cover his bed - “ _seriously, Phil, your head must be as big as your ego to need this many_ ” - stops, pulls a face, and withdraws quickly. “Ew. I'd forgotten where that'd been.”

“Well, shit, Phil, by your standards, everything on this bed is contaminated.”

Phil catches his eye. “Never to be touched again.”

“Everything. Never.”

“Awful, isn’t it?”

-

Dan leaves Phil’s house at one in the morning, when half of the streetlamps in the area are extinguished for the morning hush. Phil lends him a coat for the walk to his car, though, because _I can hear the rain from here, and no man can survive that_ \- and so Dan thinks, yes, maybe they are becoming friends.

-

A few days later, and Dan’s shrouded in tiredness. The hum of the apartment building’s heating, it’s like sedative syrup, and upon closing the front door he locks out the slumbering cloud, tail curled around fireflies, and shuts himself in with distance - burned. The stairs and corners are just a formality, arranging under his feet; he’s just so awake, mind so busy, and he’s so tired. He zones out enough to be safe from thought but not in sleep, and it’s as if he wakes up outside Phil’s door. He presses one hand against the wall of the corridor, the other rubbing at his forehead.

“I was woken up by something and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I don’t really know why I’m here,” Dan rushes to explain when Phil tugs open the door, squinting, pyjama bottoms slung over his hips. Dan scratches his neck, pulls a face. “Your work starts early, right? I thought maybe you’d be up…”

“It starts at ten, Dan.” Phil doesn’t _sound_ angry, but maybe it’s because he can barely think straight. 

“Ah. Sorry. I, er, don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Why are you apologising?” Phil asks, words slurred, head falling to the right.

“I woke you up...for no reason…”

Phil’s dozing smile is pressed against the palm of his hand as he slumps on the door. “You’re an idiot.”

“Well, not _normally_.”

“Yeah, well, _you_ couldn’t sleep, but your logic clearly hasn’t caught up yet,” Phil tells him, but he’s trying to abate it with an easy grin, so it sounds more like he’s excusing Dan.

“Yeah.”

Phil screws his eyes shut for five seconds. Dan floats in the corridor outside.

“Okay, I’m up,” Phil announces, shaking the remaining grogginess from his head. He pulls the door open further. “Come in.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The apartment hasn’t changed since Dan was last here, but it seems different, as if five hours worth of darkness has soaked right into its skeleton. The shadows lean down on every cushion, vase, and shelf - they are quietened, humbled. The candles are extinguished, the memory circles a faint imprint; instead, Dan can smell Phil’s shower gel. Feet hushed on the whispered floor boards, Phil pads through the dark back to his bedroom, Dan blindly following behind him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, doesn’t know if Phil knows what he’s doing, either. The space around his head is just miscommunications orbiting like satellites. 

Phil doesn’t flick on a light, nor does he speak again to Dan. He just straightens the duvet and slips back under it. 

Everything is painfully slow, and Dan doesn’t want to hold on to the door frame because it’s pressing into his palm like a thorn, but he feels he needs to. The line between wood and carpet is a magnetic field looped around his ankles. Even as he coughs, “ _um_ ”, he regrets ever opening his mouth. There is the very real problem that Phil is already asleep - eyes closed, jaded limbs relaxed.

Dan’s ready to fade away back to his own flat when Phil tugs back a corner. “Join me.” His fingers are ghostly from some uncontained glow - a diamond of light is tacked to the wall.

Dan offers a step forwards. “Are you talking to the pillow, or me, Zayn?”

Dan can barely pay attention, but Phil rolls his eyes, probably. “You don’t make sense...Meant you, of course. Now, join me.” It’s said as a drowsy list and it’s all Dan can do to concede before Phil drifts off. 

“This isn’t like a - I don’t want to da -”

“No.” Phil’s heat is welcome, pressed between each rib and the back of his arms like warm ice. “Not a dating thing. A friends thing.” He’s barely there, now, Dan knows, but he sounds certain enough. 

“A friends thing,” Dan agrees, edging around to face him.

“You okay, by the way? I don’t think I asked. I’m pretty useless right now.”

“You always are.” Phil’s eyes are shut, he’s not looking, just listening, so Dan copies him. The satellites flee - a thrum of heartbeats and breathing is left. 

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Phil huffs, flicking Dan with two fingers.

He laughs, “Afraid so.”

“Good.” Phil lets his head fall forward, knocking against Dan’s shoulder. Consoles him, too tired for bitterness, with “As friends.”

And that’s what you do with people you’re friends with, apparently: come round to their house at five AM, sleep for two hours, end up having sex at seven with the blinds still broken and just-closed. (The gentler side of it, the sleeping round, isn’t normal for Dan, either. He doesn’t really know what’s happening. He doesn’t know why the scattered lines of light are holding up under their scratching fingers. He just knows there’s the scent of vanilla embedded in his jacket and a mark, the colour of his mother’s lipstick, on the underside of his wrist.)

-

“This is it.” 

Dan bustles into the kitchen, pulling on his jacket with one hand and stealing a slice of toast from Phil’s plate with the other. Phil doesn’t bother to tell him off, continuing around a mouthful, “He’s used my bed and now he’s off. He hasn’t even washed my sheets. I wasn’t good enough for him.”

Dan grins around his mouthful, shaking his head in feigned agreement. “Who are you talking to?” he asks. A fleeting gesture, he rests a hand on Phil’s shoulder before hurrying past towards the door.

“I believe my plants became sentient after I gave them names.”

“Do you hear their cries for help?”

“Apparently it’s been six days since I last watered them,” Phil replies, studious, studying the plate as if it were a newspaper.

Dan can’t afford to stop, really, but he pauses long enough at the door to flash Phil a crooked grin, a short laugh slipping out from the corners, and then he leaves.

-

Three days later, ten to ten in the evening - the light is sated and brisk.

“Do you have to leave?”

It's disgustingly cold for September; the landing outside Phil's apartment flails in a chilled breeze even though it's three floors up and ten doors along. There must be a draught coming from somewhere, a fault. And Dan stops, stands, cold, fingers spun with ice as he says, “I never spend the night. You know that.” The cold clips at his ankles, leaving kisses that bite. “Sorry.”

When he turns to leave again, Phil’s fingers catch on the edge of his sleeve, fragile and slim in their hold; Dan feels a fight or flight instinct flit to the surface of his veins, feels his muscles tense.

“No, no, I know, but-” Phil begins, the tension dismounting from Dan’s shoulders as he continues, “but we could watch a film?”

Bated breath alights off Dan’s chest, and Phil could probably hear his sigh of relief, but Dan can’t bring himself to mind. He’s sure Phil understands. There’s a bump made by his spinal cord in the space between his shoulder blades, and Phil’s awaiting stare rests perfectly on it: and so Dan hurries himself to answer Phil’s request. It’s only ten o’clock, he figures, and his legs are already complaining about the walk to his car, so he nods, slow. “Okay.” Once he’s spun to meet Phil’s gaze again - lower than his, but just as certain, with an undertow of pity (for Dan or for himself, Dan cannot decipher); he nods again, faster than before. 

“Okay,” Phil echoes, lets go of Dan’s sleeve, brushes his fingers along Dan’s hand and thumb before he withdraws - and the touch is like the sunlight that breaks through the clouds and flutters on his eyelids; and smiles.

-

Phil rents _The Martian_. The blinds whir as he closes them, one by one; he closes the door to the bedroom; he hands Dan a glass of water and a blanket before taking his seat. (He sits with his feet curled and tucked up under his own quilt; Dan’s feet can’t quite sit still.)

They sit one sofa cushion apart but Phil makes Dan laugh and the film makes Dan cry too often, sometimes while laughing, and it’s good. There’s a scratch in the wall behind the telly screen, the wind is howling something raucous at the windows, and the neon light splits down the middle of them, not quite reaching the dark corners of the room - but it’s good. 

Once the film has finished, Dan leaves Phil bent over the laptop he hooked up to the TV. 

“Do you want a hot drink?” he asks, fingertips locked around the doorframe as he leans back into the room.

“Sounds good.” Phil nods without looking up.

Dan hums to himself and makes his way to the kitchen.

The true extent of the moment that just passed only hits him when he reaches for two mugs and can’t recall when he learned which cupboard holds what. (Answer: there’s barely a system, Phil has no patience to shut the doors half the time, and Dan can offer no explanation as to when he knew that, either, so he lets it pass.)

“Thanks,” Phil says, smiling up at him as he deftly takes the proffered mug from Dan’s hands. “I need the warmth,” and it means _I’m glad you stayed_. Dan nods, stepping back and collapsing onto the sofa, and hopefully, for Phil, it is close enough to _me too_ that it matters.

“It is cold,” Dan agrees as he presses his shaking hands to his chest.

-

The next morning, the air blows calmer, the leaves on the pavement beneath them rattling and shaking dew off their backs - dew that catches the sun like glitter. Sunlight trips and falls, separating the city into sixths, then eighths; for bare minutes, the sky glows purple, before the lacerations of blue grow into full wounds of navy, bleeding and bleeding until morning holds the sky fully in its clutches. Dan wakes at nine AM, well-rested and stiff from Phil’s couch.

 _Phil’s couch_. 

Tight and hissing, panic constricts the void in his chest, just below his neck but smartly working its way up. The apartment is silent, and the serrated edge of his breathing just stresses how Dan is very much _on Phil’s couch_ , not at home, in a room decorated with plates and law books and music he’s had on too loud. 

“ _This is what happens, this is what happens, they don’t understand because you don’t,_ ” the voice says.

“I know,” Dan hisses back.

The blinds weep light straight onto Dan, centre stage. The wall’s light colour now makes the room too open, too wide; a house plant sits, innocuous, in its vase, leaves tilted to him - waiting. The building groans, a deep rumble, as if waking up and stretching before winding an arm tightly around Dan’s waist. 

_What am I meant to do now?_ he thinks, and the thought is declamatory in the unravelled space. He never stays, but he can’t just slip away now, can he? There’s a blanket caught around his ankles, his head rests on a pillow: Phil knows he’s still here. Phil knows he never stays over, too. This will all, surely, give him ideas - ideas Dan cannot fuel, can’t help hold for the life of him. 

When he scrunches his eyes up, the sunlight still effaces the dark space of his eyelids, but at least his headache subdues. The press of his palms helps ground him.

“It’s okay!” Phil calls from another room, as if he can read Dan’s mind. Dan might pick him up on that later, but not now, because Phil’s offering him a mug of something warm and spiced as he enters, voice softening with his smile as he says, “It’s okay, I’m here, no one panic.”

“I wasn’t panicking.”

“Of course you were.”

Dan can’t bring himself not to smile. “And you bought coffee.”

“Exactly. Hence,” Phil points a finger at Dan, sweeping the blanket off the sofa and taking its place, “it’s all okay.”

-

Later, Dan’s struggling to read the small print of the Orwell book he found on Phil’s bookshelf. Phil’s glasses have been abandoned on the coffee table, the frames’ curved, thick shadow splayed on the stained wood. Dan can hear Phil singing in the kitchen, out of time with the clang of a teaspoon. It is a logical course of action that he should put them on. It makes perfect sense. 

Dan’s reading easier when Phil breezes in, balancing two refilled mugs and a plate of buttered toast in his hands. Not looking at Dan just yet, he bends down and almost drops them onto the table.

“Yours is on the left,” Phil informs him. He looks up, next, and pauses. Dan meets his gaze without breaking a smile, somehow, as Phil’s mouth parts, skin furrowed on his brow and around his eyes - still bleary from early morning. 

“Thank you,” says Dan. “Do you like this book?”

“I’ve read it twice. Are those my glasses?”

“I couldn’t read the font, too small.” Dan shrugs as he opens the book back up again, balanced on his knee - and he’s not entirely convinced he’s _not_ doing this for the way Phil’s eyes widen and his arms raise, palms up, and all the while both of them are fighting smiles. 

“Stop!”

“What?”

“Doesn’t this worry you?”

Dan’s frown deepens and he shakes his head, meeting Phil’s gaze as if asking him to expand on his question. Phil’s determined glare makes it clear he’s willing to wait, so Dan tells him, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

Phil rolls his eyes. “We barely know each other, and yet here you are, wearing my glasses.”

“I couldn’t read the small type,” Dan repeats. Smile threatening to spill, he sighs - quiet, subtle, because honestly he doesn’t mind one bit - and throws his legs around and onto the floor so that he’s sitting straight, looking up at Phil face on. 

“Does that justify theft?”

“Well, do you want them back?” Dan squints up at Phil through the lenses, so that Phil and the backdrop are showered in crystal lens flares. 

“I - no, whatever, if I let you then maybe you’ll go away,” Phil replies, despairingly, as he flops down onto the sofa beside Dan. 

Dan laughs, mouth wide, but stops to say, “woah there, mind the coffee.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Phil mutters, but scoops his mug back off the table and holds it close to his chest. 

“Your passive resistance is inspiring,” says Dan, who’s flicking through the thin pages with cold hands. Asking, “Do you have Mario Kart?” his eyes are already scanning the room for a console.

Phil gulps down his drink, exclaiming, “See! This is what I mean!” with his hands waving. 

Dan raises an eyebrow, shaking his head. A smile, low on his lips, curling out of him like a scream. “What?”

“We don’t know important things about each other.”

“Like Mario Kart.”

“Like Mario Kart,” Phil repeats, stifling a laugh through his frown. 

“I don’t know what’s funnier,” Dan begins, and his smile has cracked open now, hands curling into the fabric of the sofa cushion, “you, or the fact you think Mario Kart is a vital piece of information.”

“Me?” Phil parses him, jaw jutting out, before he’s distracted by how his glasses are slipping down Dan’s nose.

“Yeah.” Phil uses the bare tips of his fingers to stop the glasses and push them back up; warmth spirals out when they graze Dan’s skin - still algid, still flushed, still. Dan’s voice dips. Softens. He doesn’t know why. “Just you.”

And maybe, if they were a couple, Dan would kiss him now, but they're not. They're friends, now, he thinks; friends who hack into Philadelphia PD and fuck when they need to. And it's suited them fine, they're content. Dan’s content to believe that all of it - the correction of Phil’s misunderstanding, the frequent visits, him staying the night - shows just how okay it is. They're friends, so Dan follows Phil's pointed toes to the Wii console, laughs again as he figures out which damn plug it is.

-

Dan starts coming over more. 

(He calls the name he was meant to have forgotten two weeks ago, doesn’t stop to watch it leap over his shoulder, taunting him all the while as he carries the plates through to the kitchen. 

“This must be weird for you.”

“What?” Dan asks, stopping to place the crockery in the sink and turning on the hot tap. The water splashes. Phil moves him out of the way, placing a hand on his waist, to turn the pressure down.

“Being able to actually carry the plates. It can’t be normal for you to have the ability to balance when you’re with your hookups.”

Dan barely keeps himself from placing his hands on his hips. “What are you suggesting?”

“Nothing.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“You can’t really argue,” Phil says. More water spraying over the sides of the sink, and with Dan waving the plates under the stream of water, he continues, “you can’t even wash them.”)

At first, it’s not for work - not anymore. And then it’s not even for the sex. (Even if that stays.) 

-

On one of these more social calls, Dan’s rifling through Phil’s cupboards, his fingertips dripping with water, when he uncovers a packet of _Maryland Gooeys_. He grins, triumphant - he hasn’t had one of these in ages - and nestles into the sofa with one cushion under his head and another hooked under his arm, slipping down his chest. 

Phil returns to the room. Blinks when he sees Dan reclining on the couch, two biscuits gone and a third scattering crumbs everywhere as he eats. “What are you doing?”

“Eating.” Phil looks at him, unwithering. “I never buy these for myself, the guilt after having one whole pack for myself is unbearable.”

“That’s really terrible, Dan.”

“The fact I have no one to eat them with?” Dan checks, wearing the smallest frown. Phil squeezes into the space between Dan’s feet and the sofa arm. 

“No, your table manners,” he replies. His hand swats away the crumbs strewn over Dan’s chest and never quite withdraws; Dan rolls his eyes and lets go of a skewed smile. It rolls between them like a spinning top as Phil clears his throat and lays both hands to rest on his own lap. “You could just. Ration them.”

“Nah. I’ve got a feeling of perpetual loneliness to uphold, and it comes with sacrifices.”

“Ah, masochism.” Phil nods, then adds, “I really hope you’re joking,” as he turns his head to Dan.

(Dan smiles again, because _to be honest_ , I can’t tell either.)

-

He tries to be subtle about it, but Phil starts stocking the biscuits, and it becomes ever clearer that he wants Dan to know that they’re there, in Phil’s flat, waiting for him - even if he clings to a facade of apathy. So Dan comes over even more frequently, because _I’m addicted to these damn biscuits, now, Phil, and I can’t just neglect your stash._

“Can’t neglect your stash,” Phil says, wryly, speaking around a mouthful of biscuit, “or your stomach?”

Dan waits a second. “Both,” he admits, and reaches for another.

-

“What’s that?” Phil frowns. He watches from the sofa as Dan walks into his apartment, a cellophane packet crinkling between his red knuckles. 

“Breakfast,” Dan replies. He pushes the door shut with the heel of his foot. He does take the time to undo his shoes, though, before crashing down on the cushions beside Phil. 

“Strawberry laces for breakfast. Of course.”

“Before you ask,” Dan says, the candy caught between his jaw, “I needed to get rid of the taste of the coffee, and this was the only edible thing they had at the corner store.”

“What was wrong with the coffee?”

“Too bitter.” Dan kicks his feet up on the coffee table.

“So you’re having strawberry laces for breakfast.”

“I had a satsuma earlier.”

“So you’ve had a satsuma and some strawberry laces.”

“Mhm. And a coffee. Don’t forget the coffee.”

“Okay, and a coffee.” Phil shakes his head. “I knew your unrealistic coffee standards would be your downfall.”

“They’re not unrealistic, you’re just a coffee pleb.”

Rain taps on the window pane; Phil raps his nails along the edge of his laptop. “Get your feet off my table.”

Dan complies, but adds, “Is that you giving in?”

“I’m not a pleb.”

“Source?”

“You don’t have one, either.”

“That’s what a pleb would say, Phil.” Dan digs an elbow into Phil’s side.

“Don’t you have a lecture to get to?”

Dan’s head falls back against the sofa, “Ughhh.”

“Hey, you should be thankful you still have a lecture to attend.” Phil’s returned to typing, a constant, focused movement, and the blinds are still shut against the rainfall - the screen casts his face in an eidolic glow. He doesn’t look up, but he does push Dan’s head back up with a cool hand; smiles to himself, as if he knows Dan’s straining to watch him out of the corner of his eye. Under the press of Phil’s hand, Dan makes his head fall forward, chin resting on hands, elbows resting on knees. “How many times have I saved your asses?”

“Too many.”

Phil laughs. “Exactly.”

“Philadelphia PD must hate you.”

“I’m sure they would if they knew I existed.”

Dan tells him, “You deserved better,” and it is said with the same amount of sarcasm, yet he looks up at Phil through the bars of his fingers, and the rain is a feverish heartbeat.

“Exactly,” Phil agrees again, and he laughs again, always again, again, again, but his voice is redolent of something rueful and tired. Dan knocks his knee against Phil’s - Phil hits the enter key - the moment passes. “You know I deserve the best, and more.”

Phil’s the least selfish person. Phil’s the least egoistic person Dan’s ever met. The statement is so unlike Phil that Dan wants to laugh and press his hand in Phil’s. 

He doesn’t do this. Because this moment isn’t for that; isn’t for escaping with your responsibility tied with two cotton knots behind your back, isn’t for soft brushes of fingers along knuckles and pinhole moments of clarity worn down with cherry mouths. Even if the moment is demanding it be so. He does what is proper: adds another brick to the wall around his old heart, ensures it will not be but it will not break. (There is a flaw, a misunderstanding. The wall isn’t to stop him falling, even if his teenage self willed it to be so. There are no feelings to barricade with clay and brittle bones, because he never loves them in the first place. Not in a way deserving of romance. No, and maybe it is to stop him testing that rule, or to stop him mixing sex with friendship, but really it is to stop him caring when he has to take himself away and break their heart.) Then, he apologises, “I am so sorry, what must I do to repay you?”

Again, Dan worries that Phil’s a mind reader, because his eyes are glazed with icing sugar and his hand has gone limp, resting on the couch - like he expected something to happen and just figured out why it didn’t. 

Maybe Dan is too easy to read.

Phil smiles, and it’s an understanding. “A houseplant or two would cut it.”

“No.” Dan withdraws, act dropped. “No fucking way.”

“But _Dan_.”

“No!” Dan exclaims. “This room is like a fucking _jungle_. You know these things need oxygen too? You know they’re stealing all your air? Are you feeling at all light headed?”

Phil laughs, shoves him again. “Shut up, there’s like one in the corner.”

“There’s two, and God knows how many are living on the windowsill. You do look a bit peaky, by the way.”

“You have a lecture to get to.”

Dan groans again. “That means I have to tie up my shoes. I just took them off.”

“If you want to do something wild, you can take my mug and put it in the sink.” Phil glances up at Dan, next looking straight on as he leans forward and hooks his fingers through the handle. “Here you go.”

Dan glares at him, but takes the proffered mug. “But I’m not going past the kitchen.”

“A small sacrifice for a great cause.”

“I’m with the PD on this one: you’re awful.”

“Now, don’t be like that.”

Dan dumps the mug in the sink, the clink of ceramic skidding around the room. Out of habit, he tidies away the jars of coffee and slams shut the cupboard doors. “I’m leaving.”

“Have a good day,” Phil calls to Dan, who’s pulling on his shoes and making a point of scowling at the house plant tucked in the corner opposite.

He hesitates. “And you.”

“Do up your shoelaces before you get there.”

Dan flips him off and yanks open the door.

“Dan?”

“Yeah?” Dan lets his hand drop, voice calming down to meet Phil’s soft - vulnerable, it sounds vulnerable, waiting to see if Dan will stop, like satin hands reaching out to see if they’ll be caught. Dan turns. Cradles his hand to his body, and the rain beats quick. 

Phil smiles, and it reaches even the aphelion of Dan’s heart. “Have a good day.”

“You, too,” and Dan must say it in the right way, because Phil smiles wider. “See you soon.”

Another wide smile. Again. “See you soon.”

It’s as if their bond is tangible right now, luminescent and hooked between their sternums. Phil waves goodbye, his other hand squeezing the arm of the chair. Dan’s hand grips nothing, and it’s almost as if he can feel something there. (But perhaps it is not a something, but a lack, he considers, as his gaze rests and abandons.)

He leaves. For the first time, he doesn’t worry about tripping on the red rope, knotted to his chest in sky blue loops; because it doesn’t smart, and he doesn’t fall. 

-

His lecture takes him to work, which takes him to the offices of a brokerage firm - the building is at least twenty floors up from the pavements riddled with puddles and ashen reflections in still water. Dan arrives late, despite his best efforts, with the lapels of his coat drooping and his hair awry. When he hurries in, the place is an overwhelming hive of noise; the floor is open plan, floor to ceiling windows showing where the sun is shining through the clouds. Desks slot in around each other, without a cubicle in sight - just walls and wood and office chairs. Each desk is accompanied by at least two people: perched on the corner, bent over piles of paper, even on the floor as they hasten to answer a waterfall of phone calls. The rest of the Keating group have stashed themselves safely away at the edge, but everywhere else is occupied; Dan daren’t count, but there appears to be at least two people per square metre. Making his way over, picking out where he steps though there is nothing on the floor except the outlines of each plastic tile, Dan slips in between Laurel and Michaela and asks, “What the hell is happening?”

The fuss unfolding in front of them is electric, ripped apart again and again and again as the group watch Annalise struggle to talk with her client and the DA. 

“I have no clue,” Wes answers first, staring ahead, voice untethered. 

“Insider trading,” Laurel sighs, rearranging her bag over her shoulder. “Our _client_ was caught hooking up with the C.E.O of Edson -”

“Another business,” Michaela cuts in.

Dan snaps his head away to tell her, “I know,” but he doesn’t know. It’s odd, being new to a place - he keeps forgetting that he doesn’t know Philadelphia nowhere near as much as he knows Michigan; every now and again, he’ll look down at himself, and his feet are uneven and uncertain on the unfamiliar turf, and the sky is always the wrong shade of blue. 

Michaela continues, “Stock was purchased from Edson just before a favourable FDA ruling. It’s only obvious to assume Marren was the one who did it.”

“Marren…?” Dan shakes his head.

“Marren Trudeau. She runs this place, and owns the extensive collection of Mapplethorpes in the city, according to Google. Baller!” Asher says. 

“Her firm transacts ninety billion dollars a year in trades,” Laurel states. Wes is still silent; Annalise is still arguing.

 _Jesus_ , Dan thinks, but says, “And she was caught with Edson?”

“There was a video,” says Asher.

“Yeah, and he enjoyed it far too much,” Laurel remarks.

Dan frowns. “But that makes no sense. She’s probably spent years building up her firm in an industry dominated by men. Why would she throw it away for one?”

Asher pulls a face - jaw slack, lewd - and thrusts his hips. Dan wrinkles his nose, tutting and saying, “ _stop_ ” before pushing him out of the way.

“No one knows,” Michaela answers him, also rolling her eyes in Asher’s direction. 

“It’s gonna be a long day.” Laurel sighs again, but smiles at him.

-

“Marren says she knows it’s not one of her people, but the only way to keep this out of trial is to find the real culprit,” Annalise tells them later. All of them are crammed in a side office, Frank handing piles of papers and receipts and transactions to each person. 

“There are fifty two employees at Trudeau Securities. Your job is to interview each one until you find us a traitor.”

“What if they know our game?” Wes asks.

“Pretend it’s case research, of course. You all look young and eager enough.”

“How do you know it’s one of her employees?”

“I don’t,” Annalise replies. She rests her cold eyes on everyone as she says, “I just know everyone hates their boss. Now, off you go.”

“Happy hunting,” Frank adds.

-

It’s late evening, the chaos swept away under the tables and the cover of night. The office is almost abandoned, without even a stray paper to suggest it had ever been anything but calm. At the head of it all are the windows, wallowing in the swollen blue of the evening; water droplets splattered like freckles, large lights reflected at the top and glowing like eyes. As he walks past, Dan can see his reflection flitting on the glass. His hair has dried and he can’t help but think the way it curls looks like it’s withering away. This is the same way he sees everything, now: two-faced, waiting to catch your heels and pull you under. 

Rain always made the circles under his eyes more stark.

Dan pushes open the door without knocking. The room is small, with skin made of plastered wall and a ribcage of cluttered shelves; it’s used for storage, and for the photocopier left in the middle of the edge, which is what James is leant over now, hands braced against the grey synthetic. His back is to Dan, so Dan clears his throat, shuts the door behind him.

“You still here?” James asks, smirking with a gimlet twist of his lip, when he sees that it’s Dan. Dan interviewed him earlier, and now he seems to assume they’re on friendly terms. Dan doesn’t have any proof to say otherwise, nor does he want to, not right now. The team brought up nothing from their hunting, no clues, no feuds, not so much as a forgotten birthday card; so, really, he needs to get information from somewhere. Somehow.

“Yep.” Dan spreads out his hands (palms up, elbows bent, like broken wings) as if to say _this is me_.

“Get lost?” James teases.

Dan leans against the door, hands curled on the handle, and he nods sheepishly. “It’s the bright lights,” he clarifies.

“Ah,” James says, and laughs. 

The photocopier whirs - they breathe - the building is silent again.

“So, do you think she did it? Marren, do you think she made the trade?”

“No way.” James shakes his head, turning around to face Dan as he folds his arms. “She’d never do it.”

“Really?”

“I know Marren. She’d never.”

“Yeah, but can anyone really know anyone, properly?” Dan words it slowly, inclining his head forwards - against the stifling air of the room, against the flaccid shadows cast by the overhead light. 

“Wow. Deep.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’ve been her assistant for eight years.” James says it like he’s repeating the facts, voice tight and hedged. He meets Dan with a levelled gaze. Slower, “I know Marren.” 

“Well, who do you think it is, then?” Dan persists. James shrugs, heavy, and it strikes at Dan’s stomach as disingenuous, but he feels too embarrassed to pursue it. _No one wants to be a telltale_ , Dan thinks to himself, just as James’ eyebrow raise says the same thing. 

Through the slim window stowed into the far corner, the blue is weighted down by black, threaded with the glare of cars’ headlights. A breeze twists around them - up the back of Dan’s back, snagged at his neck. “She keeps you late.”

“I have nothing else to do.”

“Okay.” Dan nods, slowly, and tightens his grip on the handle, tugs it towards him like it’s a shield. “I’ll be leaving, then.”

“And you? What would you normally be doing?” James flicks his gaze up Dan’s body, scraping along Dan’s central nervous system. “Or should I say ‘who’? Is there a boyfriend I should be jealous of?”

“That’s very forward of you.” Behind him, the door clicks shut - the clack of fangs.

James’ eyes spark. “You know what I mean.”

Dan laughs, eyes at the floor; the sound scratches against his voice, now slow and deep, as he answers, “I do..what I want.”

-

“It’s fine, they still think it’s her,” says James - still in the storage cupboard room, slumped against the photocopier, shirt undone. 

“ _I know, I actually just hooked up with one of the interns to make sure,” says Dan’s phone, the recording buzzing and static in his hand. “What can I say? I’m fully committed to the cause_.”

“You’re fucked, dude,” whispers Dan, who’s standing in the corridor outside and smiling. 

(It’s not the first time he’s hooked up with someone for a case.)

-

Dan doesn’t think about it; not how the tables dug into his back, or how he fell apart, or how he enjoyed it. How the euphoria slipped off him again when he pulled back, like it was a moth-eaten, linen shroud. He never does, really, just lives it and then moves on. But now it feels even worse to remember, and he can’t do it, not when he’s texting Phil to ask if it’s okay if he comes over, not when he doesn’t have an answer and he’s driving towards Phil’s flat anyway, not when Phil’s still here in the back of his mind, perched on the corner of Dan’s life with his feet wearing odd socks swinging on the edge of the wall, one leg crossed over the other. Dan might not want Phil in his life for romance, but he still wants him. Picturing evenings without the movie marathons and the inside jokes and the comfort of someone else’s warmth, of someone else’s house, is too far-flung for him.

Dan won’t tell Phil. Not because it’s cheating, or because it will hurt (it will); it just seems unimportant right now. Dan wouldn’t be offended if Phil slept with someone else - he never is - and Phil won’t, either, he’s sure, and surely, _surely_ , this rope, this tie, is made of more than sex, now?

“You never said you were exclusive,” says the web of droplets on the windscreen; the wipers nod in agreement, setting the reminder to a rhythm Dan can believe. The trepidation chews on his teeth as he drives. The red rope slung easily over them is frayed from this distance, but still there - only it is dental floss now, sharp where it’s wound around his wrists and ankles.

Phil texts back. 

He thinks it’s Phil. Surrounded with congestion and the heavy beats of rain, Dan doesn’t dare look down to check.

Phil’s part of town is different to Dan’s. There are too many traffic lights, sentinel at each junction Dan stops at, and in the rain battering his car, the red, orange, and green dilate like pupils. Dan can tell from the spears of water spraying out at each side that the drains are overflowing, washing into people’s gardens from the narrow pavement. Everything here is narrow: the picket fences, the roads, the trees bracing their branches against anything nearby. Their lee is delicate, offers no support. From the few people Dan’s seen, he knows their smiles are narrow, too.

Phil is narrow - like something made of marble, though he’s not sure what. Nothing really suits what Phil is, narrow and slim and smooth and centreless, when he laughs it feels like Dan could reach in with his albicant fingers and never have to withdraw. Not like James: austere, certain, bold and blunt from the globe of his shoulders to the fold of his frown. Sometimes, Dan worries that his hook ups will crush him. Not that he doesn’t want them, no, but sometimes he feels so _small_ , hemmed with incertitude, and sometimes he wonders if he’ll love the way he feels when he wakes up the next morning. 

Phil texts back. 

At another red light, Dan pulls out his phone. He nearly drops it, catches it with the bare tips of his fingers, breathes out. In the shadow, his knuckles look gnarled. 

“ _sure_ ,” the text reads. Lower case. “ _do u need me to set up my neon lights outside again? it’s pretty dismal out there_.”

Dan smiles inwardly. “ _i’m aware. nah, ur alright. but._ ”

“ _but coffee would be good?_ ”

“ _exactly_.” Dan hesitates five seconds longer than he should. (He counts them on his fingers, drumming, _tap tap tap_ , on the steering wheel.) “ _thank u_.”

Dan isn’t sure when or how he learned the route to Phil’s apartment. It’s as known to him as his way home again, though, and the way to university. 

From here he can see the corner of Phil’s apartment block. The light flares green, distorted in the rain, and the hum of thought in Dan’s brain stops looking over its shoulder as if its done something awful. He stops worrying - cuts it off at the neck so it will cut its wailing short - warmed with the idea of coffee and someone else’s voices to expel the loneliness that comes with the storm. The conversation they’ve just had is exculpatory. 

-

“Are you shivering?” Phil asks and waves Dan into 303 before he can even nod his head.

An amber glow rested its kindled palms on the walls some time ago and forgot to take them off, leaving the chroma seared into the walls. The main lights are off, the room lit only by the lamps and candles in corresponding corners; to match the listless atmosphere, Phil’s dressed in worn down pyjama bottoms and a sweater adorned with frayed threads. A book perches on the arm of the chair, waiting. To Dan’s freezing, waiting body, it’s redolent of fiery sunset - he feels the flames wash over him. Water falls from his elbow. 

“There weren’t any damn parking spaces,” Dan says in way of an answer, and shrugs off his dripping coat. His teeth aren’t chattering, thank god. 

“I’m sorry my home didn’t come with a “ _suitable for Dan Howell_ ” package.”

“Hey, no, any normal person can’t go two minutes in constant downpour without getting a little drenched.”

“Mmm.” Passing an arm over Dan’s shoulder, Phil shuts the door, _click_ ; he does look regretful, though, scolded by Dan’s words because he does care. Eyeing him up and down, he touches Dan’s hand with a muted press of fingers. Dan holds his breath.

Once, Dan remembered this: his brother picked up on how Dan was so vocal in his anxiety, like he didn’t know that _holding your breath only happens in stories_. His words. 

_“I’m not the only one,” Dan argued._

“Yes, you are,” his brother replied, not looking. While Dan liked to stand as still as ice, eyes screwed shut until the lift juddered to a halt, his brother preferred to press his fingertips to the mirror - to leave marks of dissipating silk on the glass - his feet shuffling. 

“So what if I am?”

“It’s bad for you, probably.” 

Dan muttered, “Thanks for caring,” and wasn’t watching to see the patterns disappear into the glass. 

Dan kept the habit, held the oxygen tightly in his chest whenever they stepped in a lift, or went under a tunnel, or when there were footsteps outside his bedroom door which were probably his mother’s but there was no harm in a little fear. Holding his breath fills the bathyal chasm in his body: Dan figures that’s why he does it. Perhaps he’ll explain that idea to Phil, one day, because Dan needs to get it off his chest and Phil has always seemed like the person who’d happily take the load. 

Dan holds his breath, and Phil touches Dan’s arm, and his hair has fallen into his eyes. Dan has the urge to push it back, smooth it down where the cushions have pulled it apart, just to have something to do. Phil says, “you’re freezing,” frowning, and draws back. 

“You’re regretting not getting that package now, aren’t you?” Dan jokes, and laughs. Phil doesn’t laugh because he cares. 

He feels so weird. Standing just behind Phil’s door, tied to his place by warm hands and an undertow of self-awareness, Phil is his nurse hovering over him, bustling and worrying and mothering him all while being completely still. 

“I’d hug you, but you’re really wet. And I’m...not wet.” The look Phil offers him is the blur of the traffic lights filtered blue, even though Dan can see him clearly.

“Is hugging a guaranteed cure, doctor?” 

“I hear it’s good for warmth,” Phil explains. He throws his gaze around - to the floor, to Dan’s elbow, to the wall, to the room behind him, the order not copacetic - and tells him, “stay there, I’ll get you a towel.”

“Can’t I sit down?”

“The sofa is not wet, too.”

“Thanks.”

Phil disappears into the bathroom; there’s the sound of a cupboard opening. In the silence following, Dan lifts an arm to the nearest light. Veins, dulled by ambience, twist and writhe up his arm, perfectly in focus - his skin is pale. It blanched and hasn’t remembered to recover yet, hasn’t remembered to breathe out. “I look like a vampire,” Dan remarks.

“Stay in your lane,” the open space replies, and Phil appears again, brandishing two towels - pale and mint in colour - and kicking the bathroom door shut. 

“Like I can _help_ this,” Dan laughs, taking one of the proffered towels and using it to rub his hair dry. At a loss of what else to do, Phil drapes the other towel over Dan’s shoulders. 

Phil returns to the sofa after a few seconds of waiting for Dan to dry himself, and he sits down with his knees drawn to his chest, leaving the rest of the couch empty. Dan’s back aches and he’s on the verge of shivering, still, so he hurries his movements, rushes to be able to grab a blanket and sit down. 

Phil asks, “How was your day?” as Dan wrestles with the blanket and his limbs, trying to get comfortable as the fatigue soaks into his skin; he gives in, in the end, falls on his side, places his weight on the back of the chair, and settles his head on Phil’s shoulder. 

“Tiring.”

“I’m proud of you for pulling through. You’re the epitome of energy right now.”

Dan hums in response, jabbing Phil in the thigh with his finger because he can’t be bothered to lift his hand to Phil’s arm.

“You’re not sitting on the remote, are you?”

Dan wriggles around, checking. “No.”

“Oh, I’ve found it.” Phil waves it in front of Dan’s face once he’s picked it up off the table to his right - Dan rolls his eyes and burrows deeper down into the cushions, remarks to the fabric of Phil’s crumpled shirt, “I never want you to go into intelligence, okay?” 

Phil laughs, sound folding, cheeks curling, in the dimmer light (and Dan can’t remember when Phil turned the other lights off, or when the TV switched on, but now there’s glaring light falling on his face and an even, gentle thrum in his chest). The candle still burns in the corner, crackles, cackles, quiet. “What about my dreams, Dan? What about my _dreams_?” 

Dan can feel the gesture in Phil’s shoulders - edging up and down. “It’s for your own good.”

“I’ll bear that in mind. D’you want to watch anything in particular?”

“You can watch whatever, I have no energy left to care.”

“Aw, Dan,” Phil replies, “I appreciate your selflessness.”

“Never take law.”

“My future is looking less and less bright.”

Dan throws a hand up in the air, watches it go limp before his eyes, and knows they both smile as he says, “Welcome to the real world.”

Heat from the apartment, Phil, and the blanket combines and is woven together: his arms are no longer pale, his chest no longer hollow from chills. Red has since saturated into his skin and made his neck flush, the colour decanted by the area closest to him. 

“X-files it is, then.”

“Nerd.”

“You can leave if you want,” Phil tells Dan, tilting his head down to talk to him- chin hitting the top of his head, “the door’s right that way,” socked toe pointed to the door. 

Dan bats Phil’s leg back. Mutters,“I’m staying.”

“Okay.” A pause. “Dan, can I move my arm, please? It’s lost all feeling.”

“So you have an amoral shoulder,” Dan says, deadpan, but nods and moves forward so Phil can untuck his arm; Dan returns to his place, tucked somewhere between the cushions and Phil’s body, and after a moment, Phil places his hand on his own lap. “You good?” Dan asks.

Phil nods. “Is my shoulder comfortable enough?”

“It’s okay, I suppose. A little on the bony side, honestly.”

Phil laughs, and it’s light - combed through an exhale. “Make yourself at home.”

“I will.” Dan moves farther down Phil’s chest, to the shelf at his collarbone and the junction of his shoulder; Phil moves back so it’s easier for Dan to dig his weight into the cushions. 

The show starts. Dan takes several deep breaths, echoing the rise and fall of Phil’s chest, and feels the world quieten, and soften, and flutter its eyelids shut.

-

When he wakes, he’s slipped down Phil’s chest, arm sprawled over his lap. His hair is ruffled and Phil’s arm is holding him in place with his hand in the dip of Dan’s waist. As he stirs, Phil’s hand withdraws, and he says, “I just saved your life.”

“Thanks.” Dan twists his head to look at the TV - paused at the credits - with bleary eyes, and collapses back onto the sofa, “Did you wake me?”

“No.” Phil shakes his head and says no more. 

“How much did I miss?”

“Just one episode. Your hair needs combing, or it’ll knot.”

“I can’t be bothered, _Mum_.”

Phil rolls his eyes, runs his three forefingers through the curls on Dan’s forehead. Dan flips him off. 

“Thanks.”

“One day you’ll have to be independent, you know. You can’t count on me forever to do everything for you.”

Laughing, Dan pushes his hair off his forehead with one hand, voice riding on a smile as he says, “Well fuck.”

Dan is still lying on the sofa, head on Phil’s thigh, legs curled up half-way, one arm unfurled the rest of the way over Phil’s lap and onto the arm of the chair, laid like ribbon. He’s facing the TV, can feel the rise and fall of Phil’s chest, can’t see him. But it’s comfortable, now; Phil hasn’t asked him to move, and Dan finds that he has no energy to care nor move away, so he stays. 

“Tell me about your family,” Phil suggests. 

“There’s not much to say. What’s the time?”

“Half eleven. And there must be _something_...If you’re okay with sharing.”

“I’m fine with sharing, just don’t wanna bore you.”

“It’s interesting.” Slowly, gently. “You’re interesting.” Dan feels the accrued weight of Phil’s gaze on his back in the form of Phil tucking the label of his shirt in again; he stiffens at the touch, as if warm and cold have never met. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“My hands fidget a lot.” 

“It’s okay.” Dan watches the shadows behind the TV. Melting and clasping each other, they graze the boundaries of movement in front of his eyes.

Phil’s fingers start trailing up and down the bare skin of Dan’s arm - and, knowing Phil, it’s an example and a test of boundaries all at once. “Okay?” Phil echoes. Dan nods. “So. Your family.”

“My family,” Dan repeats. He feels numbly warm. “My mom brought us up, me and my brother. Dad left when I was five.”

“I’m sorry.” _Up, down, up, down_ go his fingers - agitated, almost. But fighting against it, as if the agitation is nerves not yet dead. 

“Nah. He’s a dick, and Mom was perfectly fine being a single parent. And she worked a lot, but she never lost time with us. She’d help me with piano practice everyday.” Dan can feel the gaps in his story, where the memories are slipping, unspoken, through the gaps in his teeth as coppers down a drain. 

“You played piano?”

“Mmm,” Dan confirms.

“That’s adorable.”

“She’d hum along with my pieces. And when I refused to practice, she’d sing them out of tune until I gave in, just to get her to shut up. She knew exactly what she was doing.” Phil laughs, and it spins; otherwise he keeps quiet, offering Dan the space to not stop. “I stopped playing piano, but she’d just hum the themes to all those video games I played. And when I had friends round, she’d bake stuff especially, and knock on the door, to all these teenage boys swearing, holding a plate of cookies.”

“Did you ever bring boys home?” Phil’s hand has paused a distance along Dan’s arm, has been that way for a while. Dan only just notices.

“Yeah. She’d bake them cookies, as well.” Dan breathes a laugh. “Only, she’d wink on her way out.”

“What a bitch.” 

Dan snorts. “Exactly, Phil.” He shuffles back, nestling into Phil and the fabric more. Phil most likely can’t move: Dan feels a small pang of guilt at that. He’s forever intruding in his apartment, anyway, and now he may be giving him cramps. “I can move,” Dan offers, and barely finishes before Phil shakes his head, because, _no, it’s okay, my central heating is shit and you’re a perfect, Dan-shaped substitute._

“Um. When I was like, fifteen, her dad died. My granddad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I only bring it up because she was hit hard, and - we struggled. I blame myself for that.” Dan presses his eyes shut, breathes out. In doing so, the ubiquitous awareness is subdued - the stamp of vespertine on his skin washed off and distance swapped for void, as if he could fall forward and never hit solid ground. 

“But it’s not your fault.”

Dan shakes his head. The grind of fabric is loud in his ears. “I could’ve helped her out more. I don’t think I appreciated her enough until she couldn’t help _me_ out, and then I just got angry if she lost her temper.”

“Okay.” Phil squeezes his arm.

It almost hurts. Phil doesn’t deny nor agree inherently; he goes along with what Dan says, and the way he’s patiently listening is appreciated but it aches that Phil knows there is little point in saying anything, it aches that Phil knows how this memory sits on his skin like moss - sodden and clinging and entropic.

“I haven’t told her that,” Dan adds, quiet and second-guessing, as a bead of thought on an empty string. He means _I haven’t told anyone that._

“Perhaps you should.” Phil means _okay, thank you_.

Dan says nothing. 

The shadows haven’t moved during the course of the conversation, of course: the source of light is the same. The TV screen seems more tired, the scrapes of fuzzy pixels more clear to his eyes as he wipes them - and his fingers come away dry.

Dan breathes out through his mouth. “What about your family?”

“My parents are together, and I have a brother - he’s married.”

“ _Married_?”

“That’s what I said.” Phil nudges him in the back with a finger. “I love them to bits.”

Phil tells him more - about the cold summers and the even colder winters in Colorado, about the floods and the family Christmases, about how lovely his family are in general and how if you want people to play board games with all day, these are the people for you - and Dan listens. 

(“That all sounds so lovely, oh my god,” Dan comments, thoughts drifting towards the horizon at the base of his skull.

“It’s,” Phil begins, distant gaze projected at a far corner of the room, “not all perfect.” He stills as thought clutches him in a sour, steadfast grip. Dan daren’t move.)

It’s easy like this, with mutual reliance that leaves no expectations, blanketed in a red that burns warm when he focuses. Dan can’t get bored of this. It’s like his gaze isn’t permanently resting on the pile of files and albums leant against the TV table, and is instead dispersed in an area mostly void. Unpursued and easily dismissed with a brush of knuckles on skin, their talk is meandering; when one person finds a topic, a path of words they then take, they wait - hand outstretched - for the other to catch on. 

“That TV is wasting electricity and it’s tiring me out,” Dan remarks eventually, sitting upright and swaying on the spot for a second, blinking the blotches of colour out of his eyes. 

Phil smiles and he’s full of something gentle that drenches Dan. 

Dan folds at the waist; rigid and sudden, the press of his phone on his hip is the tug of a Shepherd’s crook, tight around him, as he remembers - “Shit, I have something I need you to do for me. Please?”

-

“I told you, it’s simple.” If Dan weren’t the only person in the room, Dan wouldn’t really know Phil was talking to him: he’s completely fixated on the churn of text on his computer screen, fingers typing at a speed faster than Dan can keep up with. He’s smiling, too, just a little, but it’s like he’s _enjoying_ this. _Loser_ , Dan mouths to him in the brief seconds available when Phil turns to him to see if he’s still paying attention. “You download an app off the deep web, then hack into the phone company’s mainframe using basic Java code -”

“I changed my mind.” Dan yawns, leaning back with his arms pillowing his head. When he stretches, their knees knock together. “I - I don’t care.”

Phil jabs him in the ribs, and it’s so hard for both of them not to smile. “Oi. Don’t be a bitch.”

“It’s nearly midnight, fuck off.”

“All these mixed messages, Dan. I can’t cope.” 

“I’m a paradox.”

“And I’m in danger of being arrested,” Phil says, nodding to his laptop - perching on the ledge of his knees. Phil retrieved Dan a jumper similar to his own when he fetched his computer; the cuffs, light blue, tender from attention, stroke the slope of his knuckles. He sits back and runs the fabric through his fingers. 

“I won’t let that happen.” Dan looks into Phil’s eyes, framed with raised eyebrows, and almost believes that he could keep his word. The capability to twist people’s fate with his own knowledge of Justice is far from him, he thinks, but for Phil - for the suggestion of companionship knocking on the door of his ribcage - he could push past possibility. 

Phil laughs, echoing what Dan already knew, “Says the first year law student, who seems to _break_ the law more than he practices it. Well, I’m sorted, aren’t I?” He laughs again, once. Kind.

“You chose this life, Phil.”

Phil hums. “How did you get this recording, anyway? Were you, like, hiding under his desk, or -.” He stops. “Or what?”

“I’d tell you, but then you’d be an accessory to my crime,” Dan says with a smug smile and a raise of his own eyebrows. 

Muttered, “Yeah, I’m totally sorted.” His computer beeps at them, and Phil breathes out. Dan leans forward, peering over Phil’s shoulder. “Okay, the person he was on the phone with was using a phone line in Trudeau Securities.”

“Who?”

“I mean, the person _was_ smart enough to block the identifying number,” Phil elaborates.

“ _Dude_ ,” Dan exhales.

“I know,” Phil says. And Dan - god, Dan almost panics that _he knows_. (Knows what, he cannot quite decipher.) “You love me, and you want to have my babies.” He presses another laugh against his teeth. He skims his fingers along the finer edges of his keyboard.

A warmth balloons under Dan’s heart. (But it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where, because the feeling runs around his head thrice, at least - scattered, there’s no point in focus.) Back when they first met, Dan was nervous. He always is, in the first moments of acquaintances, even though he comes off more confident than anyone else in the room. And - he stands by the idea that his confidence is due to some contained desperation. Not the sad, lonely type, just carnal. The agitation always leaves after the first exchange of words. 

Now, the nerves are back - but a different species, one that lives and breathes and thuds the beat into his heart. Now, the disquiet is swollen in his chest, pressed against the snug flank of serendipity resting there. 

Dan’s lips twitch; whilst Phil looks back to his screen, bites his lip and perseveres. Minutes later, he shakes his head apologetically, “I can’t find out who it is, sorry.”

Dan shakes his head. “It’s fine. You’ve helped so much.”

“Mmm,” Phil responds, eyes tied forward, forehead drawn down. Dan tugs at a loose corner of Phil’s sweater, because _I mean it, we can use this_.

“My illicit acts will be used for justice.” Phil shakes off his reverie.

“Exactly.” Dan stands, hand brushing Phil’s shoulder before he nods towards the bedroom. “Doesn’t change the fact that you’re a complete nerd, though.”

“I never expected it to,” Phil complies.

-

His brick wall feels particularly weak. Dan spaces out to check on it, feels it fall off in chunks under his fervent fingers, as if it’s been corroding for a few days. Bricks have fallen out and no one is there to replace them: torn away by regret, maybe, or curiosity and comfort. The chalk stains his nails; the acid settles in the grooves of his belly: these nerves are persistent and sure in their occupation of Dan’s abdomen. This is making him second-guess everything. Like everything is balanced on Phil, and he can’t believe that Phil is willing to support it all - to support all of _him_ , because what’s there to love, honestly? Delicate, there’s the feeling of anticipation, of waiting for something they’re slowly constructing - and he just wants everything to slot together right.

He hasn’t done _this_ before.

(And it’s not just this new feeling that grinds quietly away at him. It’s how he isn’t bothered by his newfound ease, no longer unsettled by the stretch of his smile, adjusted to the feeling that hums in his veins when he’s in Phil’s apartment. Being new to this, he should surely, _surely_ , be scared of it, cynical to how his rules are being flipped on their head. Really, he shouldn’t be feeling like this _at all_. Pressing harder with his fingers - immured in a deep introspection - all he can feel is a silver lining that has begun to fray at the seams.)

Dan doesn’t like to think about it.

So he gives up his reflection for Phil, laid out below him - not dismantled, strong, and so open, so clear. Dan holds himself up on all fours, and he makes Phil reach up for his mouth - and he does. (Back arched like a weeping willow in a summer breeze.) He hides away the chalk stains by saying _fuck it_ and holding onto Phil’s hand.

Dan never thought that he could care for someone in this way. He’s never held hands with someone before, he barely looks his hook-ups in the eye - knew there’s a level of trust and intimacy in doing so that he neither possessed nor saw in anyone else. But there’s shadow and lingering kisses clinging to his jaw, and muted light washing his hands in frozen blue; Dan’s holding onto Phil’s waist tightly and Phil’s pressing his hands onto the junction of Dan’s shoulders, and he’s smiling, and his eyes are alive, alive, alive. (They show him a certainty Dan wants to cling onto forever and ever.)

 

He doesn’t wish for romance, he thinks - in that respect, nothing has changed - but his chest aches for this trust to be permanent. Maybe Dan can’t believe Phil reciprocates any of his blossoming care, but he loves how he leaves comfort sparking on Dan’s skin. Like he could curl up beside him and rest, like he could visit him day after day and know Phil likes him for _Dan_ , not for his body.

Phil’s fingers are slender, long, and he wraps their fingers together - lifting their hands to get a better grip, to explain why his eyes burst with an unnamable flame, to tug on Dan’s hand - like he could reach across an echoing chasm and pull Dan over to him. Phil could tell him everything would be okay, and Dan would believe him. Phil could replace the window panes for glass and Dan would still trust that the rain wouldn’t seep in.

-

Dan shows Annalise the clip the next morning. Her forehead creases as she listens, and then she looks at him, and she nods - a sign of respect and thanks Dan can’t argue with, and he nods back. When she stalks off to Marren’s offices, he follows just behind, in the wake of her heels clicking on the tiled floors. 

Marren listens with an expression much heavier than Annalise’s, weighed down, dejected, tired. She rubs her eyes and sets her glasses back on, “Alright, turn it - turn it off.” She slumps back in her chair.

Obliging, Annalise explains, “Judging from the phone call, we know James was working with someone within your brokerage.”

“He was your assistant, he had access to your login code,” Dan adds from the sidelines, with hands folded behind his back, slightly rocking on his heels. His head dips. “He set you up.” Her gaze is plaintive and strong when he meets her eyes.

“He’s been with me since the start. Since my business was just a desk in my apartment.” She looks forward, to Annalise, again. Says, “I told you not to suspect my employees…” and the laugh she spits out is bitter. Her hands go to her temples, and she rubs them, sighing audibly. “Alright, you can say it.”

Annalise meets her with a blank look.

“‘I told you so.’”

Annalise ignores the comment. Dan can’t help but know that is the most compassionate gesture Annalise would ever a client. “The important thing is we know who’s responsible. We just need him to make a  
statement.”

“Oh, I’ll get you a statement.” And Dan sees her eyes cloud with an anger that dirties her gaze like mud in water; it’s all a blur from there.

Looking back, it’s like being underwater: only remembering pieces of memory in a blur, foreheads drawn, voices spiked, and he’s detached from it all. The scene goes in leaps and bounds. First, the yelling that charges ahead of Marren’s footsteps; the denial James offers in return, glancing around at them all as Marren hurls obscenities at his chest. Dan stays back. 

“You set me up for this!”

James looks to Dan, who shrugs. “I’m loyal to my boss. No one else.”

As Marren snaps, “Why, James?” Dan sees the nonplussed front fall away into a gradual lour: rust that lines James’ insides. 

“All I’ve been to you for the past eight years is your assistant. I pay your bills, clean up after your dog, buy your tampons! My _whole life_ is about you, Marren.” He’s yelling, body rolling with the crescendo, but he says her name softer - Dan can’t tell if it’s regret, or something deeper than anger. “Serving you! Like I’m some accessory, this thing to prop you up! This was my chance to be something.”

A brief moment passes in grieving silence. “I loved you like you were my son,” Marren replies, her voice cracking a little. “And this is how you repay me?” Louder, she continues to shout at him, hands flying through the air, but Dan stops listening, flinching away as Marren rips James apart - threatening him with prosecuting him as fiercely as she can, bringing his family into it, condemning him to a life of jail and abandonment. She runs out of words, and yanks her shoe off and chucks at him, her face contorted beyond recognition; Annalise and Frank hurry forward to stop her, pull her back and away as she mutters, “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

Dan’s the only one paying attention. It feels like he’s responsible. If he’d reacted faster, ran forward, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. But he doesn’t. He whispers, “ _oh my God,_ ” standing still with his back straight as a lightning rod. Because James pushes himself off the window ledge. 

James pushes himself off the window ledge, and his feet fly over his head. He pushes himself off the window ledge, and Dan can hear the deathly thud and the subsequent screams. He pushes himself off the window ledge, leaving Dan embroiled in a conflict soaked with a foreign red, a shot of hot and cold down his spine. Frank’s figure, braced against the window - the twenty-floors-high window, overlooking a thriving street that grinds to a halt - is shadowy, undefined as Dan stumbles back against the rush of people pushing forwards, his mouth hanging open.

It feels like he’s responsible.

-

Dan doesn’t see Phil again for a few days, too wrapped up in the case to have any time to himself - and his thoughts, for which he’s grateful. Dan’s studied law long enough to know that, despite James’ statement, they need more if they can get Marren’s case kicked out during the preliminary trial. After all, the proof of her innocence is stone cold in a morgue, under a grey sheet. They have to find the people he was working with, meaning a long, drawn-out evening spent studying records of people’s activities and backgrounds, hunting for suspects. 

It’s midnight when they find them - well, when the others find them. Dan sits at the table, wringing his hands and shaking his knee and trying not to think. 

“The trade was made at two forty-seven PM,” Frank addresses the group. “Talia Lewis logged out at two forty-five.”

“I interviewed her. She tried hard to steer me away from looking inside the company,” Michaela tells them, certain. 

The conversation continues in this way, until the group comes to a conclusion - Talia did the trade, James told her when Marren went out for a smoke break, and Jimmy Worshaw went with Marren to distract her - and decides to act on it in the morning.

“Okay?” Laurel asks him, quiet, as everyone stands and Frank strides to Annalise’s office to report their findings.

“Yeah,” Dan replies, quieter, and barely feels the breath leave his mouth.

-

Dan gets home, and he spends half an hour scrubbing at the red wine stain that has dried on his kitchen floor, buried deep in the cracks. 

-

Phil’s apartment is so warm. 

It always is. Unlike Dan, Phil can afford to have his heating on for longer, and he’s home more than Dan, so the heat can settle into the flat and burrow into every crack and cushion. Algid and biting, the winter loses its grip whenever Dan steps in, and, today, he yearns for the feeling, to step through and have all negativity stripped carefully from him. 

“Hey,” Dan greets Phil when the door opens. He knows he must look a sight, with the skin under his eyes stained purple and his hands fisted into the cold fabric of his coat. 

Upon seeing him, Phil’s expression softens into a fond smile, resting his head on his hand against the door; gently, he replies, “Hi,” and offers him a knowing, comforting look. 

Dan is flushed with relief, and so, so tired, and he falls into Phil, switching the chill of his coat for the warmth of Phil’s sweater. Phil stumbles against him, but his arms fly out to either side of Dan’s waist, and he holds him there. 

“Don’t move,” Dan tells him, as Phil presses his face to Dan’s neck - Dan can feel the glow of heat on his skin. “If you do, I’m seriously concerned I may fall.” Phil lazily runs his hands up and down Dan’s sides.

“I won’t let you,” Phil says, comfortably, “‘m good at that.”

Phil practically carries him inside after a while, then sits and listens as Dan recounts what happened, from Marren finding out about James to - well, to _James_. Dan doesn’t cry, just sits and stares at his constricted skin, but Phil treats him like he is - looks at him with wide, pitiful eyes, cradles Dan’s face when he kisses him, skims the skin of his neck and chest and cheeks gently with his fingers, piecing him back together. 

-

“I guess it just shows that some people just can’t cope with their own actions,” Dan says, voice raised so it can reach Phil in the bedroom, shirtless, legs crossed, comfortable. Taking two bottles of beer from the fridge, he slams the door, slams them on the table, then yanks the tops off with the bottle opener he found in the drawer - eventually, that is, because although Phil may be somewhat a technical genius, the idea of a cutlery drawer is far-flung for him. He’ll remark on it later, he decides. He won’t remark on how even he himself can’t always cope with his own actions. “Take this guy, for example. He couldn’t take it, and he cracked.” The alcohol fizzes when the metal is torn off the glass. Dan laughs to himself, bitter, “Literally...his head, on the sidewalk…” His words sink in, the memory rushes forward, and he shakes it off; he sets the bottle opener down beside him, balances his weight on the palms of his hands, pressed to the table, and stares at the wall opposite. The carbon dioxide flows from the bottles like smoke from a volcano, ready to blow. “Just -”

“I _know_ , I actually just hooked up with one of the interns to make sure.”

 _That’s James’ voice._ The confusion is cutting, the sharp hilt of a burden carried too early. _(No one was meant to die.)_ And then the realisation hits him full throttle. 

The tape continues, and Dan doesn’t react at first. The reaction is gradual, as if he didn’t plan for this (he didn’t) and doesn’t know how best to take it; so he stands there, weight entrusted in his bare arms, hair curling and flaccid and falling in his eyes. He’d told himself that Phil wouldn’t care if he slept with other people, that’s why he didn’t tell him - but now he’s very, very unsure. Breathing out, he braces his shoulders, biting his lip; his eyes squeeze shut as his eyes roll to the back of his head, like there’s an escape route tucked in his frontal lobe. 

There isn’t. He leaves the bottles where they are, fizzing away quietly, and walks to the bedroom; Phil cradles the phone in one hand, holding it away from him, and he’s sniffing and wiping his eyes. The sheets are still unmade. 

Dan stands at the door. Crosses his arms. 

“I knew there was a reason, why you were so pissed off at him.” Phil’s voice is heavy and coarse, pulling his gaze down when he meets Dan’s eyes - red-rimmed, he’d discovered when he glanced in the mirror on his way here. He sniffles. “I didn’t _want_ to be right.”

“Phil -”

“But I was.” In the following pause, Phil looks at him properly - unwavering - and Dan latches onto stubborn desperation, because Phil is so vulnerable and dejected and _this isn’t what he thought would happen_. The silence is pricked with the stumble of rain on the window pane; it’s nighttime, and suddenly the dim light needs to be much lighter: the shadows painted along Phil’s cheeks and jaw are aging him, deep pits buried in his skin, fissures where the hurt seeps through like venom. The paint on the door frame is cold on his back. Startling and nocuous, the temperature evokes a longing for the warmth of the bed and Phil’s sure embrace. “He played you.” The phone lands on the sheets and disappears into the shadow.

Listlessly, Dan notes that it’s started to rain. “Hey, c’mon, it’s...it’s not like we said that we were exclusive,” he tries, because that reassurance worked for him - never confirming they were exclusive never felt ill to him, he hadn’t slept with anyone other than James since meeting Phil but the sex hadn’t prayed awfully on his mind - and Phil’s not looking at him, he’s staring at the wall, which is good because Dan wouldn’t want to meet his eyes whilst saying that. 

Phil wrenches his head around. When he opens his mouth, all that comes out is unspoken hatred and heavy breaths. The prolonged wait drips from his lips and pools on the duvet like blood. 

At long last. Phil speaks, and it is even and calculated and deliberate. “Get out.” His bare chest shivers with the words. 

The blood rushes in his head, he goes limp, but Dan urges himself to stay calm; he stirs, lifting his body away to lean again, dependent this time, on the doorframe, and shakes his head. “Phil, no, don’t.”

Phil stands. He’s dressed in only his boxers, littered with the marks of Dan’s own doing - destruction - that burn in the shift of light: weeping blues and purples, tears, swollen reds. “You can't just let people down gently, can you? You have to make your mark.” Dan doesn't know if the person saying it is Phil in real life, or the voice in his head. Both, most likely.

Dan flails for things to say - clutching them and delivering a sentence before it snaps. “I like you, actually, I do -”

“‘ _Actually_ ’?” Phil hands Dan’s sentiment back, bloodied and revealed to be rotten. Dan acknowledges this, how his attempts to be heartfelt are corrupt and pathetic, he can hear his own forewarnings like electricity, and he damns his wall for falling down, damns himself for letting it end up like this. Up close, Phil’s eyes are shown to be embellished with tears, threaded with red, creased with fury. 

“Phil - God, that guy was just sex, for work, but you - you’re more than sex, I like hanging out with you!” he hastens to say. Phil’s strides are so computed it aches, his face so composed while Dan’s letting hurried words pour from his mouth; his body is anchored and deflated at the same time as Phil crowds him towards the door. “Don’t make this a big deal -”

“Get out.” 

Dan stumbles backwards. He tries to meet Phil’s eyes again but can only make it to the glistening curve of his shoulders. Phil’s hand on his chest is firm, pushing, Dan’s clothes fisted in his hand and posing as a barrier between them. Dan continues back, running away on blackened, branded soles. 

“Phil!” Dan objects, his hands lifted in surrender.

“I said _leave_ ,” Phil stresses. His fingers curl tighter, and Dan’s head is spinning into a panic: he’s being kicked out and it was all so perfect minutes ago but Phil is so broken, suddenly, like a gust of wind has brought down Jericho, and it doesn’t add up because Dan never thought he’d hurt him.

The door slams in his face. It bounces on the hinges, and the scene dies.

Dan never thought he’d hurt Phil because he never thought Phil would care that much. Most people used him for his body - why would Phil be any different? 

After staring at the shut door for a few seconds, after no sign of movement or rethinking is revealed, he bows his head and runs away on blackened soles. As he walks to his car, his feet are sopping from the rain and the bubbling acid that leaks from his heart.

-

_part 3, in which sam is revealed to have no alibi for the night of lila’s murder, and annalise, rebecca, and eventually wes discover that sam was having an affair with lila; annalise tries to cover it up; rebecca runs away but returns when annalise plants evidence on griffin_

-

Phil kicks him out. 

And that’s when Dan realises that, no, they weren't friends after all; they just fucked when it was convenient. Anything else that had happened was collateral damage. They began in unison and understanding, two clocks ticking in sync, but they floated slowly out of time - as all people do, Dan’s learned. Deciding he has no room for hard feelings in his life, he wipes his mind clean of any blooming friendship, and starts anew. There are plenty more guys out there that he’s sure he can pick up.

It’s hard to predict exactly how life without Phil will be, but it’s soon evident that life will be just as it was before they met: late nights in clubs and late nights in his cold flat with work splayed out in front of him, days spent running on coffee and the chaotic order that accompanies both lectures and working with Annalise. It should be simple, but the lifestyle only supplies unease and lasting tension, because “Before” equates to barely any time at all. The knowledge of Phil has existed for the vast majority of his life at Middleton, and since that familiarity and Dan have now severed, Dan’s been left lost and wondering why it’s so hard to adjust. The shifting of his bones goes, the shock fades, but there’s a notable loss: the gap next to him in bed his arms are able to spread out into, the space to his left his eyes glide over, the jaded silence after he remarks something to himself. A loss that, were Phil temporary and unimportant, shouldn’t exist, and yet it breathes and bristles and bows its back. 

-

They’re at court. Again. 

The defence team for Griffin, the other suspect in Lila’s case, have been leaking detrimental rumours about Rebecca to the press, and Annalise wants a gag order. Though not as busy as it sometimes is, the courthouse is still bustling, the corridors - sharp edged, painted cream - a river flowing with suited bodies and pinched scowls; Bonnie’s shoes squeak on the floor as she leaves them, the sound spreading out and away like a ripple. 

Court is short and blunt: talk of a gag order is quickly overshadowed by the defense team’s request for Lila’s body to be exhumed; because, your honour, these red marks on the side of Miss Stangard’s neck look suspiciously like nail marks, and Griffin can’t possibly have made them as his nails are clipped short for sport.

“What is the motion here? Mr Keagan was not here to testify, your honour,” Annalise interjects.

“We move to exhume Miss Stangard’s body,” the attorney announces, voice steady and expression unmoved; Rebecca’s face falls, crumples as something - guilt? fear? dread? Dan can’t tell - takes ahold of her neck. “We believe a second autopsy will reveal Miss Sutter to be the sole murderer in this case.”

Annalise and the prosecutor - Dan never got her name - are outraged, up out of their chairs. 

“Keagan is making ridiculous, unsubstantiated claims against my client, your honour!”

“Hasn’t the poor girl gone through enough? This cannot be allowed, your honour!”

“You two will have time to righteously object at tomorrow’s hearing,” the judge cuts off their yells. Rebecca twists in her chair to send a pleading look Wes’ way, her mouth parted and her eyes clogged with dismay; the bright fluorescents of the room pin her to her chair, sniper’s lasers making her pupils dilate. Sternly, “We are adjourned.”

“Wouldn’t her body have turned to jelly by now?” Asher asks once they’re outside again. It’s decidedly quieter now, and Dan can see Wes talking to Rebecca at the other end of the corridor.

“They embalm bodies,” Laurel replies, with barely a hint of impatience. “It slows the bacterial decay.”

“The fact that you know that is creepy _and_ sexy,” Asher replies. Dodging around someone as he follows the group through the courthouse, Dan rolls his eyes.

“Oh, hey, Dan?”

The whole group turns to the source of the voice; he’s holding a newspaper in one hand, his suit is a dreary grey, and he’s almost squinting at Dan with his head tilted.

“Hey…” Dan remembers him from last night, or the night before; they met on Humper, he knows that much, and the sex was okay but forgettable, sloppy from intoxication, and he can faintly recall thinking - both at the time, and in hindsight - that he was too harsh, too square-jawed, his hair too short that looked a disgusting shade of blond in the light (or so his inebriated mind says). 

He scoffs a laugh. “You don’t remember my name.”

The rest of the group are silent, and Dan can see Michaela’s intrigued sliver of a smile in his peripheral as he stutters out a response, “No, I totally do, it’s…”

“Wow, and I thought _I_ was a slut,” he says, and walks away; everyone’s left with various degrees of confusion in their expressions, Dan has a bemused smile on his face, and he raises his eyebrows before moving on with the group again.

“Have you really slept with so many guys since Hacker Boy broke your heart that you can’t remember their names?” Michaela asks him once they’re out of earshot. She looks to him with an almost comical look of disbelief. “Are you _that_ bitter?”

“I’m not bitter. Or heartbroken,” Dan says. Because he’s touchy. Because he’s not heartbroken and he still doesn’t have any powers of control over his actions even though he’s sober.

“You can’t remember _their names_ , Dan.”

Dan gets out of his emotional slump long enough to quip back, “The important thing is that they remember mine.”

-

To try and block the exhumation, Annalise enlists Lila’s mother, asking her to testify against the request. The mother sobs and begs, small and slim in the wooden cage of the witness box, and her performance should evoke a pity in the jury that - along with the temporary alliance with the prosecutor, who approached Annalise with the notion that _Keagan is the only one who benefits from this, I want this to go ahead as much as you do_ \- should win them the hearing. Annalise, Dan must admit, is too smart for her opposition’s good. After her statement, there’s a recess; the walls are filled with unrestrained whispers, murmurs about what will happen if the exhumation goes ahead, if Sutter and O’Reilly really did kill Lila together or if it was all Sutter. Residue from the newspapers remains, the words _slut_ and _drugs_ and _sex_ being thrown around like confetti and making Dan’s skin crawl. 

“Here comes Mystery Man,” Laurel sings, sly as she smiles at him.

Dan’s managed to recall his name: Julian, Julian with the square jaw and forgettable everything, Julian, whose gaze is sliding and stuck to Dan’s body like sludge, who makes sure Dan has to twist his shoulders out of the way to allow him passage, Julian whose chest is still bare millimetres away from his despite Dan’s best efforts. Dan achieves a demeanor of apathy but feels his breath hitch.

“Wait, so you forget his name and he’s _still_ into you?” Asher says.

“Seems so.” Dan shrugs.

“Do you have some sort of voodoo penis?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Asher,” Laurel tells him. “It’s a cockatrice, surely. They’ve got cocks for heads.” She says it simply, the sleight of emphasis coming across as didactic cadence, and Dan laughs.

“I’ll see you back at the house.”

Dan trails after Julian, gets his attention by calling his name, but all his best efforts to have dinner with him are made redundant when Julian reminds Dan of his boyfriend, whom Dan managed to forget. He leaves the courthouse sated but relatively empty-handed, wondering how he could ever think he could have a connection with someone that went further than sex and deceit. 

-

The prosecutor goes against her word, arguing for the exhumation and destroying Annalise’s case. Court adjourns until the following day, giving time for the jury to go over the new evidence, and the whole group return to Annalise’s offices in the wake of a murmuring confusion of _why did she flip?_

The question hounds Annalise, and she pulls Bonnie into her study; she tells her they must find out why the prosecutor flipped, and could Bonnie please get the students on the case? Her tone is, of course, more impatient and firm, and Bonnie agrees - of course.

“The way to find out someone’s secrets is through their assistant,” Bonnie tells the group some minutes later. She spins her laptop around. “The directory lists Wendy Parks’ assistant as Ally Burnham. The girls at the DA’s office often hang out at The Thirsty Whale. Go down there, flirt, find out why she flipped.”

“I’m on it,” Asher declares. He claps his hands together, and sets off for the door.

“Dan, Wes, you go too.”

“What? Why? I don’t need them!”

“This works on women as well as men,” Dan tells him, one finger waving at his face. He’s reminded of Phil, and of James, and his heart clenches until it aches; he walks it off, leaving the room to retrieve his coat and hiding his face in the shadows of mid-evening.

Back in the lounge, Dan can hear Rebecca ask, “Can I go too? I’m great at flirting with girls.”

Dan peers over his shoulder to see the reply. Bonnie answers without batting an eyelash, “no, you’re staying here,” before twisting her computer back around and focusing on her work. Rebecca glares at her for a few lingering seconds - the tension between her and Annalise has been growing over the past few weeks, as Lila’s case developed, and Dan senses there must be something rotten and scabious growing through the cracks in the story. 

Dan keeps walking.

-

The Thirsty Whale is a cheap, lackluster bar in the centre of town, where the light is tarnished and murky, where the stools creak and shake, where the grease on the food leaves lost fingerprints on the wood. Neon lights in stripes on the ceiling leave puddles of blue and green on customer’s faces; the tables and seats form no order, with benches and chairs and stools splayed out in some areas, held tight in fists in others, so that Dan, Asher, and Wes can all sit with Ally even though her table only has one seat - which is swiftly claimed by Dan. Cheap is the operative word: the beer is tasteless but painfully affordable; Dan downs two pints in the first ten minutes, and is nursing a third as he tells her, “I actually just got out of a relationship myself,” his mouth knotting around the words to make a gnarl in the bark of his lips, his head swirling like the wine in Ally’s glass - the ripples crested in a luminescent blue reflected from the lights above, restraint and poignancy undulating out of him like the condensation rolling down the side of his glass because of his tight grip.

“Oh yeah?” she says, smiling (the cherry of her lipstick clashes with the deep red of her wine). “What was her name?”

The alcohol drowns any pain Dan might have, and after a few moments of staggered thought he says, “Felicity. Fucking _Felicity_.” Behind him, Wes rolls his eyes.

“She break your heart?”

Dan grimaces. “If only. No, I, um, cheated on - her. And she found out. Obviously.” When he laughs, bitter, the drink sticks in his throat. His hand aches from holding onto his drink for so long. Ally nods politely, again picking up her wine.

“So, Ally, what’s it like working in the DA’s office? You mentioned you worked there,” Wes interrupts from his place behind Dan, his elbows and clasped hands on the bar.

Ally opens her mouth to reply.

“Hey, dickhead, we’re actually having a _conversation_ here, so.” Dan sways a little as he points to Wes, gesturing for him to shut his mouth. “So, anyways, I know I should apologise, right, but is there really any way I can make it okay again? Like, I fuc- I fucked up big time, and now he-she. She - now she hates me.”

“You could get her flowers? Flowers always work.” The wine glass was strangely silent as she placed it back on the table, there was no _ping_ of solid on solid, the rings of water coalescing. Dan drags a lazy finger through the puddle, splitting it in half. “You give us flowers and we’ll forgive you the world.”

Dan nods, smiles at her in thanks, and excuses himself. 

-

The judge passes the motion, but in the midst of the intensifying chaos that is Rebecca’s case, Dan is stood in a quiet corridor pushed into a high corner of the city, the light pressed weak and yellow onto his black trousers. The flowers weigh heavy in his fist, setting the balance of his wrist off-kilter; their petals flutter as he moves the bunch from hand to hand, their stems still dripping in freezing water from the florist’s pot. In the couple of days since his escapade in The Thirsty Whale, Dan’s impatience and seemingly perpetual loneliness have driven him to debate Ally’s suggestion over and over, to the point that he had, in some post-three AM fit of despair, decided _fuck it, I’ll do it_. It isn’t like he can do anything else, after all.

Each time he forces himself up to the door of 303, he hesitates, muttering under his breath before shaking his head and backing away again. He hovers outside Phil’s door; he hovers around the corner. He has no expectations for this, doesn’t expect it will work at all, but perhaps that is why he is so unwilling to get it over and done with: the embarrassment at its lunacy, perhaps, or, the wish to have this limbo last forever. Though he can’t be doing this for too long, every time it seems like the shadows are fatter, the outside light darker. 

When he finally talks himself into it - body pressed to the wall around the corner, eyes scrunched shut - there’s the click of a door opening. Dan dares to look around the corner - and oh, oh, it’s Phil’s door that’s opening. And one silhouette drifts to meet the other, and drifts back inside again, leaving the visitor alone in the corridor. 

The stranger walks straight past Dan, his clothes smelling of mint and drugstore deodorant, and Dan breathes out in relief when the stranger doesn’t deem him deserving of a second glance. Lingering in the middle of a small apartment building, with the bouquet of flowers still clutched and weeping in the crook of his elbow, he would have a lot of explaining to do. 

The sight leaves a mire of rotting emotion in his chest, but Dan hasn’t got the energy to examine it. His breathing is slow, his heart steady - it’s like his body is coated in syrup. Or thick mud. 

Music starts drifting from Phil’s apartment. Ubiquitous and serene, the melody takes Dan back to a October night spent in 303; and he longs for the well-worn texture of Phil’s flat - for the stacks of books and computer wires, for the jaded bed sheets doused in warmth - to a degree that makes him nauseous.

Tangled in an unravelling net of dismay, Dan is ready to leave - turn his back and, finally, never look back. But, amongst those knots, he can feel a pull: a ribbon, tight as a piano string. Phil is everywhere and nowhere. And he hates it. If he burns this bridge, it may be the closure he needs to nail the coffin shut. He’s spent too long toying the idea that this storm is temporary, and the rain will melt away to reveal reality to be just how things used to be. Each time he brought his hand up to sever the tie, his shaking hand would draw out a hum of notes that lulled him back to waiting. 

Time dissolves like salt down his sides as he sways in a tempest of vacillation. Fumbling in his pockets, he pulls out a piece of paper and a battered ballpoint pen; after a few taps of plastic on paper, he scrawls out a few words. The ink does not smudge.

In the end, he doesn’t do it because of the hope the longing brings him. Walking back down the corridor, bending his knees and not his back to place down the flowers (that’s how he was always told to do it in preschool, and he figures doing it correctly could help, somehow), he does it because to kill a flower properly, you have to locate the very base, the root, and - slice. 

So he leaves the flowers, with a note attached that reads, “ _in case u forgot to water ur houseplants_.”

It’s not anonymous by any degree, Phil isn’t dumb by any means, but Dan hopes there will be enough doubt that Phil can’t quite bring himself to throw them out.

-

_part 4, in which rebecca and annalise discover that sam was having an affair with lila; annalise tries to cover it up; rebecca runs away but returns when annalise plants evidence on griffin; a number of cases go by, all the while the tension between sam and annalise is growing; nate approaches rebecca and asks her to find evidence on sam’s laptop_

-

He’s at Wes’ place for a study group. He doesn’t know why he’s here, really, he didn’t have any plans to be, but Laurel came up to him after court today and asked him if he wanted to join her and Wes. She looked at him like she actually wanted him there, not because she felt obligated, and she smiled, sweetly; Laurel is kind, and patient, and good, better than a lonely evening tucked away in the middle of his flat, so he said yes. After, he looked to Wes across the way, and saw him nod. Dan nodded back.

Wes’ apartment is dark on the outside and, impossibly, darker still inside. Where the streetlights throw arcs of arthurian gold - faded with age, but strong against the shadow - against the overhangs and undercuts of brick, the light inside hangs without a lampshade, and withers far before it reaches the shadows that sit on the bank of lockers like a cape; the building’s facade is victorian and gaunt, with stripes of black where the pools of light don’t meet. The door gives way under his touch. It swings open to reveal the communal hallway: wooden floorboards, bikes propped against the walls, a wide staircase trailing up into the dust. Inside, it smells of bonfire smoke and incense from one of the flats. Lining another wall are beer bottles and cardboard boxes; the flat numbers for the lockers are written in pen or pencil on pieces of paper that don’t quite fit in the slots provided, the corners tattered. Part of him worries for his car, parked outside on the verge. 

Quiet under his feet, the steps turn a corner and lead him to the first floor - he turns left, and tries the handle on 2B. This, too, opens, and he steps in while unzipping his coat, saying, “You should’ve told me you live in some sort of Shrieking Shack, dude, we could’ve met at my place.”

Carding a finger through his hair, he looks up - sees Rebecca and Wes standing as if at arms, gazes unmoved and stiff with anger. Wes’ back is to him, but he turns sharply at Dan’s voice - Rebecca’s hand rests on top of a rickety desk. Dan takes this and slows to a stop, looking between the two of them. “Sorry, am I interrupting something?” He reaches behind for the door, a gesture that he’ll leave if needed.

“I was just leaving,” Rebecca snaps; she picks up her coat, and Dan barely has time to move out of the way as she storms out, hair flying away from her face. A hollow crack as the door collapses into its hinges. The air is pulled tight and bears holes - holes in lace or in clothes left to the moths for many years.

In the following silence, Dan casts his eyes around as he shuffles farther in, away from the reverberating door. Furnished with only bare essentials, Wes’ room is desolate and vulnerable - a painting on the wall, scratched wall paper, a bed with a crumpled sheet, a desk and a chest of drawers - as if he’s ready to take up and leave, as if he’s not expecting to stay. Rebecca’s door slams. Music pours through the gaps, at a violent and rebellious volume that creases Wes’ forehead.

Dan grimaces, “Bitches be crazy.”

Wes huffs, and begins shuffling paperwork around on his desk, making a pile of notes for their study group on the floor beside him.

“What were you -”

“Wait.” Frozen, Wes grasps repeatedly at the empty space on the desk, frantic as his fingers slip on nothing. He swears and drops to his knees, lifting books and sheets and throwing them back down with a cry of frustration that tears at the edges of the room. 

“Dude, are you -?”

“She took it.”

“Took what?” Dan asks, but the question staggers and doesn’t reach Wes as he, too, stalks out of the room and starts banging on Rebecca’s door. Dan hurries after him, pulling the two sides of his jacket together against the rushing chill that floats from below like hollers; the smell of fire thickens. Wes leans against the door, back bent, fist smarting red. His expression, one that was always passive and kind before, is twisted and fierce.

“Rebecca! Rebecca!” he shouts, voice wrung tight to overcome the boom of her music, and still it is weak in comparison. The windows - forgotten at the end of the landing - cut shadows on his face.

“Dude -”

“What’s going on?” 

Unbeknownst to them, Laurel made her way up the stairs to the sound of Wes banging on the door, and now she has reached the top she stares at them both: hands clammy and tucked over her ordered collection of books and folders, halos of water under her eyes.

“Let me in!”

“Are you okay?” asks Dan under the clamour of yells and music, and Laurel shakes her head, wiping at her cheeks. 

“Yeah, yeah, it’s just really cold outside.” She breathes in and out to melt the ice-spears in her chest; Wes yells louder and the music grows with his anger and Dan knows that really, it is not changing at all. “Stop changing the subject,” she continues, “what’s going on?”

The words defile off his tongue sharp - a click, click, click like time falling off a pendulum, his eyebrows raising and falling even as he draws his shoulders closer in. “Rebecca took _something_ ,” Dan tells her, directing his emphasis at Wes’ hunched back, “but I don’t know what. And now Potter here has started a vendetta.”

“Let me in, Rebecca!” Dan marvels at how Wes keeps his voice free of minatory tones, as if he wishes to protect her and keep her story, despite his dwindling patience.

Laurel winces, “That door isn’t going to survive.”

Dan looks back to the scene, feels the whisper in his feet as wisps and waves of vibration navigate the floorboards. Agreeing, he steps forward - holding the wall as if he were clutching Wes’ upper arm - and snaps at him, “How do you even know she’s in there, Wes?” He exhales, offers a cordial smile. “She might just be playing music to throw you off.”

Wes stares at him. Brow furrowing, he parts his mouth - shadows leak out like ink. He backs away. Gaze locked on the doorknob.

“You’re not going to, like, bash the door down, are you?” Dan asks, hesitant. 

Dan isn’t sure if he is listening anymore, but the door stops charming Wes with dark siren song as he shakes his head.

“Did you bring your car?” he asks Dan, lifting a finger to point.

“I -”

“What did she take, Wes?” Laurel murmurs, reaching for him. Wes doesn’t react; his chest heaves and he searches Dan’s face for a response; his eyes imploring and his expression pulled apart like his skin is bed sheets, desperate and vulnerable and aching and pleading. Dan barely feels himself incline his chin. But Wes jolts into action, whirling around, his feet hurrying as feet on stairs of hot, glowing coal do.

“What did she take?” Laurel repeats, stepping forward and calling after him - hand curled around the banister. “Wes, what happened?” Her voice swells with trepidation but is not enough to evoke more than an “ _I’ll explain on the way!_ ” from her fugitive. 

Slack-jawed with disbelief and annoyance, she faces Dan, who shrugs and stares down the stairs.

“Dan!”

Wes’ voice shocks him into action. “Coming!” he replies, and offers an apologetic look to Laurel before bounding down after Wes, his mind vaulting and hurtling down the cliff face before his body can catch up; Laurel’s footsteps are behind him, the cheers from the bonfire party ahead as he catches the door Wes throws open.

-

“If any of these twats touch my car, I’m running them over,” Dan grumbles.

Students line the streets, their attire and face paint fizzing, fulgent, in their wake while they race down the pavements and over the roads. Brutal, their yells and hollers strip the night of its peace and ensnare Dan’s car in a net; the air smells so pungently of alcohol that it is as if it drips with beer. Above, the sky is dark, inflamed with an occlusion of cloud: all the candles in the heavens snuffed out. With Wes behind him and Laurel leaning forward from the back seat, Dan locks his jaw and stares forward, body tucked in to maximise the space he has between him and the next person - for he finds himself in a cage of flesh and blood, filled from his toes to his crown with disquiet. Just as the clouds clog the sky, the stench of smoke clogs Dan’s nose, his eyes starting to sting.

“ _This is Rebecca, don’t leave a message._ ”

Dan bites his cheek.

“She’s still not picking up?” Laurel says. Her voice is a pair of open arms - annoyingly so, because Dan has been sitting in his car for twenty minutes because of Wes, and he’s past breaking point.

“Look, how do you even know she’s at Annalise’s?” He looks at Wes, fingers uncurling on the steering wheel to gesture. “She might be hungry, or maybe she wanted to go stargazing.”

“It’s a cloudy night.”

“She couldn’t have known that.”

Wes ignores him. “She went there.”

“I _know_ , you keep saying! But what if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not.”

“So what? We have exams to study for, Wes, I don’t care if you’re having a domestic…” He laughs to himself, bitter, and he presses on the brake pedal once again.

“Wes?” Laurel pries gently.

Wes sighs: a rumbling in his chest. Eyes sharp, mouth a tight line, thin as a spear.

“Sam killed Lila, okay? _That’s_ why she’s there, _that’s_ how I know. That memory stick is her key to proving it...Lila was her friend.” Eyes shut for a moment, he finishes quieter than how he started, as if cradling the memory.

Dan pulls his eyes back to the road, and the time it takes for the knowledge to sink in passes over him, a slow and smarting bleed. Inexorably, it slides down his back, faster as his shoulders heave higher and higher, as his breath struggles to climb in time with an avalanche of thoughts. Bitter. He managed to avoid the murder, to avoid everything to do with Lila: she was a backstory, a case that would filter away and become one more horror story for the university - locked away in its past, and she was not relevant to him or his work. 

Until now.

Because now murder himself sits next to him, stationary in a hoodie and jeans, fierce in voice while he sits composed on the shadows of the car as if it were a throne; neon flares and fluorescent tears of light wriggle across his shoulders like maggots; the car crawls slowly forward.

As dust settles in pores and cracks, the thought settles; as condensation tiles the pane of a mirror, this new reality tiles his sight, coming to light as his heart jolts amongst rusted blood. Weighted by a fresh weariness, his shoulders fall towards his chest. His hand comes up to his chin, fingers curled, and he leans on it. In the mirror overhead, Laurel’s face is unreadable, blemished by dust - swaying with the rock of the car. 

Blood roars in his ears. Blood thunders in his head. Blood swells to the surface where his nails pinch skin. A light mist rolls across the pavement, kicking up at people’s feet like dust around chariots; it blurs the city lights, but they remain sharp in his eyes. The cheers and songs of students rally, and for a moment it is like he can hear every single one individually. Sloven, each note swarms in his head.

Laurel’s eyes are on him. Wes’ keep flickering to meet his in the rear view mirror.

Wes feels pressured to speak, “Nate approached her, told her if she -”

“Wait, wait,” Dan interrupts him, aching with a smile, “so this isn’t a joke?”

Wes shakes his head. “Sam killed Lila.”

“Of fucking course.” He rolls his eyes, his hand opening so his fingers are several degrees of crooked as he says, staring into a corner of the dashboard, “of course he did.”

“If you don’t believe me, then -”

“No. No, I believe you.” Dan’s hand grips the steering wheel with one hand, the other splayed out in its gesture. “It’s just that it was so obvious Rebecca would be the one to bring us all down.”

“ _Dan_ ,” Laurel cautions.

“It’s not her fault, she thinks -”

“I don’t fucking _care_ what she thinks!” He thwacks the steering wheel, and the resulting sting is lost to him. “This is on - meant to be on _her_ shoulders, and now I’m being dragged into it.” He’s angry from fear - nothing else, really. All logical responses have fled from his terror, from the twist of the knife in his chest as Laurel whispers _we’re all being dragged into this_.

Wes drops his head. “That’s not her fault.” Not astringent, but regretful. Perhaps he is only now feeling the chains on his own shoulders. 

Sitting there, with Laurel’s reserved breathing in his ear, and his heart beat in his finger tips; with astringent bellows and cheers drifting on the smoke to him and erupting in his head, he has never felt more alone. Each person sits in their own mire of thoughts while the car stops at some traffic lights, holding on to their trembling innocence for a while longer.

“No, it’s not her fault, it’s yours,” mutters Dan, averting his gaze.

The lax touch of Laurel’s fingers grazing his shoulder. “Dan. Please.” She turns to Wes, inclining her head, and whispers, “What does she think?”

“That this’ll take the blame away from her. Nate offered her a deal: take the memory stick, download information from Sam’s computer, and she’ll be cleared of suspicion.”

“How?”

“Phone records, bank transactions, I don’t know.”

“You’re meant to be a lawyer,” Dan says. _We’re meant to be law students._

Laurel ignores him, leans farther forward and clings onto Wes’ seat with five neat fingers. “What else? How do we know it’s Sam?”

“He’s who Lila was seeing. He’s the naked man on her phone.”

“So, Annalise knows?”

“She knows that, at least. Yeah.”

“Why would Annalise defend Rebecca if she knew Sam was involved?”

Wes sighs. “Because I told her I’d go to the police if she didn’t.”

“Ha!” Dan exclaims, surprising himself. “You blackmailed Annalise. You, who nearly crapped his pants on the first day of Law School.”

“Dan, shut up,” Laurel tells him, and next, to Wes, “So you knew about this? And Annalise? And Nate?”

“I’m sorry.”

“This night just gets better and better, you know? I’m throwing my life away for some memory stick, I can’t wait to tell my kids this story.”

They enter a more suburban part of town, decorated with less streetlamps and more skeletal trees. 

“No,” Laurel says, slowly, unraveling her words from their spool of yarn. “No, it’s not that at all, is it? It’s Sam. And Nate. If Sam hadn’t killed her, we’d be fine. If Nate hadn’t told her to break in we’d be fine.”

Dan scoffs, forcing it out to stop its barbs sticking in his throat. He hates being like this: lashing out, thrashing against his anxiety as control edges away from him. “We’d still be fine if Wait List didn’t want us stopping her.”

“Dan -”

“They were having a domestic before she took it. Was this what it was about? Maybe if you didn’t screw a client only to have trouble in paradise we wouldn’t be here right now.”

“I know.”

“What’s going to go wrong, Dan? We’ll stop her and get out.”

Swinging lazily, the sign for Annalise’s Law Firm hangs from its gallows, a silhouette at the horizon. Absently, “He’s a murderer.”

“We _think_ -”

“The reason this is even _happening_ is because he’s a murderer. So. He’s a murderer. And we’re breaking into his _house_.” This last word smashes in his frustration. Tears are acid in his eyes.

“We’re going to stop her and get out, Dan, it’s fine.”

“And then what? What do we do then? Pretend we don’t know what he did.” He points a finger at Wes (bathed in a sickly white from the passing streetlamp, he’s slowly fading). “You might be able to do that, but I can’t.”

“We’ll think about it later, Dan. Calm down, Dan, please; for your own good.” Her hand rests on his shoulder, squeezes, lingers for longer this time. Her voice is soothing and diplomatic. “It’s no one’s fault, Dan.”

Knowing she’s right, his hands shake and his teeth grind and fear has him completely captured, tied around his skin like the net used on supermarket meat, and he cannot bring himself to speak or nod.

A phone rings. Wes draws it from his pocket, looking peeved, and answers it with his gaze hanging out the window. “Michaela? Woah, woah, Michaela, slow down. Who’s fighting?”

Dan snatches a sharp breath. 

“Is Annalise there?” The sound of Michaela’s voice through the speaker is crackling. “Sam killed Lila and Rebecca’s trying to prove it,” Wes answers her unheard question, and Dan’s stomach falls again. 

“If only we could see her face right now,” remarks Dan.

“You can’t leave her alone with him. Promise me you won’t leave….Michaela? What’s he doing? Michaela, talk to me!”

“Dan, drive faster,” Laurel says.

The drive continues like this for the few scavenged minutes they have, Michaela’s shrieks augmenting through the phone and Wes yelling at her to _talk to me, damnit!_

Reeling and lurching, the car pulls up onto the gravel drive. “We need to hurry,” Wes says. Dan brings the car to a halt, and Annalise’s house looms before them undisturbed as the engine hums into silence. They open their doors and step out, the ground jolting and swerving like a salt-slicked deck beneath Dan’s feet.

Wes leads the way, continuing to open the door wide without waiting for them, or his own thoughts, to catch up. “Michaela?”

“Upstairs!”

Following her voice, Wes sprints up the steps two at a time, Laurel and Dan rushing behind him; Michaela’s voice can be heard through the walls, edged with urgency as she tries to compromise with him, asking him to _stop and sort it out, please, Mr Keating_.

“Stop!” Wes commands as he rushes into the bedroom. Dan stays behind him; Sam is banging on the ensuite door, where Rebecca must be; Michaela withdraws upon hearing Wes’ voice, clutching her phone in two quivering hands. Only a lamp lights the room, it drags senile light and impure shadow across the contorted angles of Sam’s skin. 

“Get out of my house.” He wheels round to face the group.

“We’ll leave, if you let her go. We’ll be no more trouble, I promise.”

“She took my laptop, what the hell does she want to find?” Sam yells, fists balled into bullets at his side.

“I don’t know,” Wes replies. Dan presses his back into the door frame, _we do know we do know we do know_.

Wes has his hands held out, a sign of peace and reconciliation, and Dan can feel his optimism slither away. “Just...calm down, and we’ll sort this out.” His chest is heaving from running - Sam’s from fury. His eyes flit to the door, before meeting Wes’ determined gaze. 

He steps aside. 

Wes nods to him, and approaches the bathroom door. “Rebecca, it’s me. You can come out now.”

“Give me a minute.”

“She doesn’t sound bothered at all, the bitch,” Dan whispers to Laurel, and gets an elbow to his ribs.

“You can come out now,” Wes repeats, but resigns himself to the wait.

“Okay, I’m coming.”

“Good. I’m here.” Wes looks pointedly at Sam, whose hands are locked to his hips as he paces back and forth, forehead drawn. The door clicks, and Rebecca emerges; she steps forward, laying the laptop on the corner of the bed. 

“What did you do?” Sam asks, jutting his chin towards it. Wes stands between them, arms out to make a subtle barricade.

“Nothing. I didn’t find anything.” For once, Rebecca’s nonchalance and calm tone does them a favour, as she doesn’t infuriate Sam further.

“Please, just let us go.”

A moment passes, Rebecca and Sam staring at each other. Daring the other to cave, to wave a blood-spotted handkerchief and admit their guilt. Finally, Sam steps back, waving an arm at the door. “Go. I won’t do anything.”

Wes nods, and guides Rebecca out of the room. Dan allows himself to breathe again - only for it to be crushed out of his lungs.

Sam leaps at the pair, landing on Wes and sending them falling to the floor with a heavy thud. Rebecca screams, Michaela shrieks, and Wes starts yelling at them, “grab it, grab it!”; Sam’s hands snatch and snatch at empty spaces as him and Rebecca scramble for the memory stick, Rebecca trying to shake him off as she cries for someone to get him off her. The scene is almost normal, Dan is so numbed by shock, and he steps forward to reach for it. 

Sam’s palm flies through the air and slaps him across the cheek. The sound cries out, and Laurel gasps. Dan withdraws, hand to his cheek. Where Sam’s ring collided with flesh, there’s a focused pinpoint of pain. Michaela’s prayer of _oh my god oh my god_ is a hellish intonation in the background of his torment.

The three tossing bodies are warring shadows, falling into the dark of the lowly lit room; and when, upon hearing Wes call her name, Laurel hurries forward to pin down Sam’s arms, she too disappears into it for a moment. Limbs bend and grab and struggle against each other, Laurel’s hair hanging in her face. She manages to wrestle the memory stick out of his ugly fists, somehow, and immediately springs back. Wes has freed himself from Sam’s grasp, and is instead holding him down when Sam throws him off - he is merely a fly, a torn kite, compared to the tornado of his rage - and tears after her. When Laurel passes her, Michaela screams, following her onto the landing, and screams again as Sam follows the same trajectory. Laurel is rushing down the stairs, and Sam is yelling, and Michaela’s arms are flying out in front of her - clawing and digging at air, but suddenly it’s not air but Sam’s shirt that they find.

It’s dark, the floor is slippery with wood polish, and his scent bleeds alcohol. 

His spine arches when it meets the banister. The momentum sends him forward, the bridge he has formed crumpling in on itself as his feet keep going. Clutching at air, his hands splay out into half-fledged wings, and his face never has time to look more than betrayed that his home cannot offer a handhold for him. His feet, they don’t stop, they never stop, and he plummets through the air with elegant somersaults, halted at each handrail by the thwack of bone on wood. Each crack is thunder. Dan is filled with bile and flushed clean of it too quickly to acknowledge as they all run to the edge, peering over the edge as if it were a chasm; Michaela’s scream still vibrates in their surroundings; Laurel fell back against the wall when he started to plummet, and she remains there, hands digging into the ledge to remove some weight from her shaking knees. 

Within seconds he is on the floor. The last crash is the worst, deep and hollow and fatal, a pulse through the space above that signals the end of his heartbeat. Dan, Wes, and Rebecca rush forwards, joining Michaela at the rail; they lean forwards over the edge like it’s a chasm, and the image forces their lips apart. 

All of his limbs are pulled into different directions ( _north south east west_ ), a gnarled star on the floorboards; one stray beam of light turns dustmotes to galaxies, and the vacuum of space is silent. A ribbon of blood crawls out of his ear and along his jaw. 

(Dan’s mouth hangs open, his breath churning between his teeth. Seeing Sam lying on the floor, all he can think of is his own downfall: a titan turned icarus, life - just begun - hurtling to the ocean in a pillar of smoke and a flurry of limbs.)

With one treacherous, torturous wail from Michaela, the silence is disbanded. It shatters like bone - wrenched upon as the sound twists and writhes, never ending and never tiring. All Dan can do is curl his fists and clench his jaw. Shards, smarting and sickly white, stick in his chest, he feels them catch in his throat.

“Oh god, oh god oh god oh god,” she whispers, one hand at her mouth as she sways on her feet, as if tossed by the wind. Dan watches her other hand turn white as she grips the banister.

“We need to go downstairs. Sit down,” Wes says, voice clear and unbroken unlike Michaela’s. He doesn’t seem scared or shocked, and if Dan weren’t filled to the crown with fear, bitter as wine, if it weren’t exerting the most pressure in his chest and neck and head, then maybe he’d frown or complain - but his own horror has rendered him free of anger for now. Laurel nods in agreement and pulls herself up, shakily, her legs saplings caught between the jaws of a storm. Wes places an arm around Rebecca and starts to guide her down the steps. Dan steps back, meaning to follow, but he can’t drag his gaze away from the precipice of Sam’s death, nor the convulsing silhouette bent over it. 

“Michaela,” he says, gently, wishing he could reach out and hold her. “Michaela, we should - we should go.” He nods his head towards the three slumped figures, and remembers she can’t see. He knows she caused this, knows in a minute he will lash out despite himself; right now, though, a tiny shred of empathy and care blooms, pushes against his fear - or, perhaps it is his own fear that causes him to say it, the fear of being caught if she stays here. In a minute, he will be the same useless mess of nerves, the anguish will undulate out of him as larva, so perhaps he sees himself in her, and his own wish for comfort when that happens evokes an obligation to help now, to avoid hypocrisy. 

Instead of speaking, she nods and gasps, her hand shaking, and steps away. Dan keeps his distance. The pair trails after Laurel’s shaking footsteps.

Silently, Wes guides Rebecca to a chair in the living room where they normally work, keeping the lights off. He remains standing, arms hanging by his sides; Laurel and Michaela crowd the doorway, Michaela curled up against the wood. The air is violently still. Dan can feel it slither over his skin. No eye contact is made.

Voice breaking, Michaela says, “Wha-what, what have we _done_?” She gasps again, her eyes pulled to the corpse strewn on the carpet. 

“What _we_ did?” Dan keeps his voice down, knowing that if he yells, a witness might overhear and testify in court, setting their fate in stone - and oh, _God_ , this is it. The anger, he knows it now, knows its familiarity and its embrace and its habits; and he hates how helpless he feels, as his blood fills with rock, as his voice is a whip lashing from his mouth. All he can do is channel his fear as hatred for this position and everyone who put him there. Maybe, it is justified, but he knows it is too much. It is all too much. “No, Michaela, this was you,” he spits, the fear revealing itself as spite in his throat, astringent and acerbic, words saliva flooding his mouth until he nearly drowns.

Confusion ignites in her eyes - where is the man who talked her down from her own panic? 

“What? No, he - he was coming at us! I was protecting Laurel!”

Laurel steps up beside her. “She was!”

“Then you _both_ did it!” Dan throws his arms out in the air. His lungs heave, and he hides his face in his hands; his locked jaw bites into his skin, gritted teeth grinding, trying to contain the spewing air. 

“We did _nothing_ ,” Laurel hisses, palm slicing the air; she is determined and fierce, sounding like how she does in court, or when she’s fighting with Frank.

“Well he was definitely alive before you chucked him over the railing!” He places the words stiffly, broken apart and jagged. 

“We should call an ambulance,” Michaela says. Her gaze has returned to Sam, and it appears she’s caught up in her horror again. Absently, her fingers pick at the buttons of her coat. 

“Why? He’s dead, idiot!”

“We still need to call an ambulance.”

“And say what? That you killed him? That you’re going to jail?”

“Shut up, shut up.”

“We should be calling the police, is what you mean, Michaela.”

“You did it, too,” Michaela says.

“What are you on about?”

“You killed him.”

“No, no, I didn’t anything.” Dan backs away.

“It doesn’t matter what any of us did,” Laurel says, walking into the room, finger pointing from the body to them. “We were all here, so we’re all at fault.”

“How?”

“You do law, you tell me,” Rebecca mutters.

“Rebecca was stealing private information off his computer. That’s a felony. We could all be prosecuted for felony murder -”

“No no no no no, we were just defending ourselves.” Dan wants her to shut up, for everything to be quiet. The colours of the room are stained in shadow and yet sting his eyes, the house lies dormant and he wants it to fall from under his feet. 

“We broke into his house: he was just defending himself,” Laurel cries, low but crescendoing. 

“I just wanted to turn in the trophy,” Michaela whispers into her clasped hands, shaking her head. “I wasn’t part of this. I wasn’t part of your plan.”

“There was no plan, that was all her.” He points to Rebecca, and sees how pale her skin is in the low light. 

“I didn’t ask for anyone’s help.”

“Fine, then we can thank your fucking boyfriend for that.”

“The ambulance, Dan, please, we need to call an ambulance,” Michaela begs.

“I told you, you mean the police. He’s dead!” 

He can’t stop saying it. Death is a stranger to him, and its sting evades him, and he has to keep saying it to feel real again, to feel like he has it under control, and in reality he is weak and he is falling. He cannot stop saying it.

“Fine, the police, but we can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

Wes says, “No, think: no one knows we were here,” his hands out in front of him.

“Annalise could come home any second,” Laurel says, aghast, expelling a deep breath.

“Which is why we should leave.”

“You want to run?” Michaela asks.

“I’m just saying,” Wes presses, looking around at them all, “he fell,” his hand goes to the body on the rug, “after drinking too much.”

“My car’s outside, anyone could have seen it,” Dan hisses. He’s torn between safety and guilt, and it lacerates from his left shoulder to his right hip; the knifing heaves of his breath searching deeper.

“Your car’s here all of the time,” Wes replies. “We can easily just -”

“No,” Michaela cuts in, her shoulders going slack. “We should call the police and tell them everything.” Rebecca stands up and heads for the kitchen.

“But Rebecca can’t -”

“I don’t care about Rebecca, I care about my future!” 

“But you did this! Just like we all did! He’s dead because of all of us,” Wes addresses them. Dan draws his shoulders in, pulse squirming under the lapels of his coat. It aches to not look across to Sam, to not stain his vision blood red. “And maybe that’s okay! He killed Lila and was gonna let Rebecca go down for it! It’s not -”

Another thud. It’s a shorter fall than before. Rebecca’s protests are muffled and desperate - torn gasps for air, screams severed short. At first, in the darkness, Dan can’t see, even as his eyes search and search. But, as Michaela cries, “Oh, my God,” and jumps to her feet, as Wes whirls around, he makes out - with a horror that slices through him like lightning - the image of Sam nailing Rebecca to the floor. His hands are on her neck. His jaw is fixed with strain, body a crooked and leering gargoyle. His skin is cyanotic in the light gushing through the curtains. As he watches hungrily for the life to leave her, he looks almost pleased. 

“Do something!” Michaela shrieks again, reaching out for Dan and Laurel but never touching them while they stand statue still. “Get him off her! Do something!” Never before has Dan met such raw fear: the panic for someone else as their world slews sideways, death clinging on. His jaw hangs slack. He can feel the world pass between his teeth.

Dan doesn’t see Wes move. He doesn’t see him grab the trophy, or stand over Sam, or lift the trophy above his head. Brutal, calculated, he swings it down; it makes contact right in the center of Sam’s head, where his neck meets his skull; neither the trophy nor the deed weighs heavy on Wes - he strikes quickly. 

Out sprays a splatter of blood. Rebecca gasps again and bites it in as the red decorates her face and torso. Dazed, Sam holds himself above her for a few drawn out heartbeats, stolen time.

It’s like a tree falling; gradual, slow, rocking from side to side, before the deathly crack and the complying, aged sigh as the trunk crashes onto the forest floor. Sam looks so confused, all primal fury siphoned out of him. He is only permitted to waver for so long, to breathe for so many more breaths, before his body gives away. Slumped over Rebecca’s body, she wears him like a sash.

Dan has seen death all over again. Except, this time, it’s most certainly real. Still, only panic fills him - the morals, the realisation, the guilt, they will come later. Now, Dan is a cataclysm of nerves, a clash of self-destruction and self-preservation that renders him useless. He can feel all sense being torn from him. A bystander, he must do nothing but watch as his heart shakes hands with the dark parts of his thoughts. 

All confidence rushes out of Wes, the threat gone. He stares, appalled, at the trophy in his fist. His hand goes slack - a palinode. 

The trophy clatters to the floor. The scales scuttle away and out of sight.

-

Wes tells them all, _we have to leave_ , hands wrapped tight around Rebecca’s arms. Dan looks at Sam’s body and throws up in the sink. He frantically twists the taps on, plunges his hands under the cold water. It runs clear, just.

After retreating to the woods behind campus, they return to get the body under Wes’ instruction; rolling him up in the rug, they heave him out of the house and into Dan’s car - placed between the seats like a bouquet of flowers. Laurel scrubs the floor and sink until her fingers are red and raw. Calm, Wes tells Dan to drive them out of town to a gas station, where he buys gasoline and a packet of biscuits. 

They burn the body under the mask of the bonfire. Dan breaks the charred limbs apart with a crowbar. Each crack sends a throb up his arm.

“We need to dispose of this in an incinerator,” Wes says next. Sam fills four and a half bin bags, stacked up in Dan’s boot. 

“No, I can’t,” Dan replies, barbed. He’s had enough - his fingers shiver on the steering wheel. Instead, with Wes’ objections shrinking with every attempt, he takes them to a nearby rubbish dump. Teeth gritted, they throw the bags away. His arms carry the swing on, even once he has let go and the bag has fallen into the bin with an empty thud, and Dan stares at the pale, almost cyanotic, pallor of his hands: held out in front of him, held at a distance. _They did this; I did this._

Dan is alone as he drives. His car smells of fire and gore, the metallic stench of blood drifting up every now and again, even though Sam’s body was as pure as marble, before, and after had no blood to bleed; and fear stirs in his stomach like ash. 

He needs someplace safe. Somewhere familiar, where he can let the fierce guilt and panic of _what have I done?_ consume him. Dan cannot question the fact that this state of stagnant nerves is temporary, and there is worse to come. _Worse_ is such a faraway term, it seems impossible; he cannot stop thinking about it, already, about the murder and the loss and the look in Rebecca’s eyes when she saw what her lover had done. But Dan - somehow, without experience - knows to take heed of its shadow; his blood is pounding, the event has started to soak into his conscience, and the quickened puffs of his breath are only a small nod to what is to come. This is more than he has ever known. Right now, alone, petrified, and desperate, Dan is focused on the law, on Sam, on everyone else. Consequences, parsed and separated. Soon enough, his own role will become clear, muddying the waters, knotting his veins. Dan needs the freedom to feel this - perhaps, it will alleviate it, or even dispose of the feeling forever once it is over. Most importantly, he cannot be alone.

Driving towards Phil’s apartment block, he tells himself it is because it’s closer, and Dan’s shaking limbs make it dangerous to drive. Perhaps he shouldn’t go: he risks getting Phil involved, and that is the last thing he wishes to do. Plus, Phil and him are arguing, haven’t spoken in weeks. But. He isn’t thinking straight, and their recent altercation bears little weight to his decision, compared to the storm in his head. 

He cannot be alone.

-

The last of his vacillation is spent in the driver’s seat of his car: engine off, staring at the fractal light on the windscreen; a state of terrified inertia which he puts down to concern for Phil, anyway, but it’s more likely to be due to his energy loss. It is easier to sit here, the sun buried in the Earth, without moving - plus, it may stop this from founding itself in reality. Crime doesn’t exist in the in and out of his breathing. As doubtful as he may be about Phil’s involvement, he accepted on the ride here that he is too selfish to care. 

In these gentle hours of dawn, the apartment building is barely lit, illuminated only by the diffident flush of emergency lights tucked away, their eyes directed to innocent corners. His arrival kickstarts a desperation he didn’t know he had. Moments ago, he could barely bring himself to look up, yet now he is bounding from stair to stair and paying little heed to corners and doors - he knows where he needs to arrive. Hands buried deep in his pockets, his arms tighten across his chest, a straightjacket against the cold. Dan can only be grateful it isn’t snowing outside. Or - no, perhaps he isn’t, perhaps the snowflakes could provide a guise, could wash away the soot and freeze the agitated twitch of his fingers. Steps digging into the carpet, he flits through each floor. Silence - sleep surrounds him. Never reaches him. 

“ _Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more,_ ” comes to mind, messily knotted to ragged breath, tying him to roots of youth and ease, but Dan lets the unwelcome visitor in. 

He was never meant to relate to Macbeth. 

Staring downwards, he watches the carpet prickle where his feet imprint in the fabric. Alone in the corridor, the full presence of this thing can be felt. It swamps, overwhelms, looms. It will rule his life, Dan knows. At least - at least he knows that he never planned for this, never planned to guide himself into the jaws of something that is, and always will be, much, much bigger than him. 

He finds himself outside 303, with little memory of how he got here. His feet cannot stop pacing. Knocking, he discovers his fingers and knuckles are still plastered in grime and gore, but it’s too late now. He keeps pacing, staring down at his hands - spread out tightly; he decides the best option is to screw his eyes shut while he waits.

When the door clicks open, it is a funeral knell. 

“Dan?” Phil asks, bleary, and Dan dares to look and grimace - Phil is huddled around the door, sheltering behind it like he’s afraid of Dan - before continuing to pace. With his back to Phil, he shuts his eyes again and squeezes his fists. Memory takes Phil’s voice and twists it sharp, he hisses, “Dan? What the hell? It’s four AM, Dan! I thought some murderer was at my door!”

Dan doesn’t have the energy to point out - sarcastically, how he usually would - how foolish and nonsensical a thought that is; why would a murderer knock? He doesn’t have the heart, not when it is clenching and writhing in his chest. (He knocked. He is the type of murderer to knock.)

“Nope,” he replies, turning, and he can’t stop laughing bitterly as he holds his hands out either side of him in a flourish. “Just me.” He holds Phil’s gaze as best he can, and Phil does the same.

“It’s four AM,” Phil says again, jutting his chin up at Dan as he studies him.

“Yes.”

“It seems you're making a habit of it,” Phil notes, whimsical, with the residue of a smile that sends Dan’s heart knocking even more furiously against his chest. After this moment of what Dan can only describe as foolishness on Phil's part, Phil exsanguinates the look from his cheeks, shocked back to life as he remembers himself again. Dan’s ragged breathing occurs to him seconds later, and next Phil straightens his mouth, looks like he doesn’t know if he should comfort or furrow his brow.

He decides to narrow his eyes to arrow slits. “What happened? Why do you stink of smoke?” The accusative tone drains out of him, he seems to blanch, and his eyes widen; Dan stands, useless, vulnerable, in front of him, unable to offer anything in answer. “What _happened_ to you, Dan?”

“I. I -” Dan trails off. He has nothing, he is utterly lost, and left feeling even more hollow for his efforts. 

He didn’t think he could cry. But the tears well up, and the crescents under his eyes ache with their weight. His next breath dismantles itself in front of him, shaking and wavering and crumbling. 

“I fucked up, Phil. I fucked up _so bad_.” Perhaps he is inhaling too much smoke, but his throat goes sour. “I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up.” His voice breaks, he’s struggling with every gulp of air; his knees give way beneath him, his skin is burning, and he collapses against the wall. He curls up, knees locked to the tirade of his beating heart, his arms running up and down his shins so that his shoulder blades keep pressing into the wall; he is small as he can be but still fear - jagged and pitch black - hounds him, crowding against him. His sobs swell up to the roof of his mouth, subsequently sing with astringent discord as they clatter back down - there is no time to feel the strain as the next one chokes him. He cries for Sam and for Annalise and for his friends and for Phil - Phil, whom he left, weeks ago, crying on the wrong side of his door. He feels pain, and he feels fear - vast, fumbling fear - and he cries for this, too. He cries for himself and the twilight hours he has endured; with the sun stuck under the horizon, threatening to return and reveal his deed, but never showing mercy and acquitting him. 

“I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up.” It’s hard to breathe but he cannot stop repeating his fate. It is not cathartic, it is not a plea for mercy; rather, he is trapped in his own doing. Maybe it is acceptance, but hearing it aloud means he can never stop hearing it; once his voice runs out, he will never stop thinking it. 

“It’ll be okay,” Phil comforts from beside him, a hand settling tentatively on his shoulder. Dan did not see him duck down to meet him. His eyes flicker to Phil’s hand and away again; his shoulder aches like a raw wound. Dan’s chest is heaving and it won’t stop, struggling against Phil’s grip, but Phil holds tight.

“It won’t, it won’t.” Dan shakes his head. Eyes stinging, he screws them shut, and the tears bead and bleed out from the corners, dripping down his cheeks - warm, crimson - _no_.

“It will be.” Phil sounds so certain of himself, in spite of the furrows in his forehead: convincing, not for his own sake, but for Dan’s, because Phil truly believes it - at least, he looks like he does, and Dan recalls this quality about him. Dan suddenly longs for such confidence and trust. 

Phil is right here, offering peace and warmth in his softening eyes and bitten lips, as flowers beginning to bloom in the spring; this is more than they have had in weeks. Phil is right here, and yet Dan finds himself missing him more than ever. 

He drowns in another sob. He can only shake his head in response. 

“Dan?” Phil bends his head down, trying to catch Dan’s eyes; he keeps repeating his name, to ground him. It is working, perhaps. Phil smiles gently, grip firm on Dan’s upper arm. “Dan, can you come inside with me? Just. Tell me everything.”

Dan can’t do that (he barely knows it all himself, dammit, he is so fucking hopeless) but he nods.

Phil stands; Dan scrabbles for Phil’s hand to help him up. His weakness burns his insides but he is already blanched with fear, so the only thing damaged is his pride. The pressure crowds him in smaller, and he cowers - and when his hand meets Phil’s, part of him withers. 

Phil nudges open the front door and leads Dan through, their hands hanging at their sides. Navigating by the pools of light from the corridor, he leads Dan to the couch. He leaves Dan sitting there, doubled over, his hands holding each other tightly, his weighted breaths hollowing out his cheeks; once he’s retrieved a blanket and draped it over Dan’s shoulders, untangling Dan’s charred coat at the same time, he heads back to the door for the light switch. The living area has two sets of lights - two lines of bulbs that run parallel with each other, perpendicular to the door; Phil only turns one set on. It sets the room in an unstable warp of light and shadow. Perhaps, he didn’t wish to disturb anything. It’s six AM, untouched, and his friend is turning up after a month; smothered in smoke, and burning up surrenders with each breath. Too much light on the situation would be unsettling. Dan gets that. He does.

Phil perches on the sofa next to Dan - who doesn’t look up, who catches his gaze before it travels. “Okay?” Phil whispers. He leans his body towards Dan but doesn’t touch him: a gentle gesture to say _I’m here even though I shouldn’t be_. 

The walk has evoked some kind of reset in Dan’s head. Frozen, he’s crawled back into himself; and at first, he presses himself against the chair’s arm instead of Phil’s, hunches his shoulders until pain tingles between his shoulder blades, and wishes silently that Phil doesn’t come near him. He struggles against Phil’s presence. 

He can’t stop shaking. That’s all he can think about. His knees vibrate violently, up and down, up and down, up and down, his chest pulls upwards, his fingers tremble. His entire being is an earthquake: he can feel it as if he is falling away from himself, drifting out of control only to be snapped back - whiplash - with another cough, or a sob, or a particularly strong shake of his legs. While his body tosses and turns, his vision swims, his sight rocking from side to side in the sea of the rotten blue lights; his veins are fat in his arms, but waves of ice cold hit him head on, and the chatter of his teeth cackles in his ears.

Muddied by his tears, his eyes ache against the low light; the lights Phil turned on are the set farthest from them, so only the gentlest talons reach them; curving over their bodies and eclipsing half their faces. This way, at least, he can’t see the extent of the state he’s in. 

Guilt itches away at him, because he can see Phil sitting there in his periphery, uncomfortable and clueless. A thought orbits Phil’s head with a startling grace, _this isn’t a good idea this isn’t a good idea this isn’t a good idea_. The digital clock blinks a red 4:23. 

“I’m sorry I came back,” the words edge out. His body angles itself, barely, towards Phil. Though he’s stopped hyperventilating, his fervent fingers can only just grip hold of his calm, his chest aches, and tears stain his cheeks. 

Phil stays silent. Dan doesn’t look at him, doesn’t wish to see apathy paved in black and white on his face. Time passes - Dan fancies he can hear the tick of Phil’s watch, balanced haphazardly on a table across the room. 

Phil purses his lips in thought. “I’m not. I want to be, but I’m not.”

And then Dan starts crying again, starts clinging on, and he never really stops.

Phil holds him close. He presses his nose into the junction of Dan’s neck, and Dan can feel a wetness on his skin - he squeezes his eyes shut. The scent of smoke sits between them, tangling around their limbs, but Phil is warm and palpable and Dan breaths in his scent as readily as the smoke forces back against it, so that his head is fuzzy with contrast. _You are so alive, Phil, so kind, you got my share_.

Phil prises himself away, arm trailing over Dan’s back, but he sits close. The rise and fall of his chest is a guide for Dan’s, his legs steady against Dan’s trembling knees. Patiently he sits, as Dan struggles to break the surface of the tempest in his head - the same problems, and more, now his history with Phil is, irrationally, added to the mess. Memory swamps him, worry swamps him, and the currents bring same thought after same thought back to him. The murder will never go away, Dan knows, so he merely sits and waits for his anxiety to melt from his throat.

 _One, two, three_ , he intones in his head, focusing on timing his breathing to it, trying to elongate the time of each. It half works, but every few are broken.

“Thank you,” he manages, speech fragmented by jumps and breaks. His fingers tremble; his fear breathing in his lap, with an erratic pulse, quivering as a kitten just born. He stares at it - eyes wider when Phil reaches down and clasps his fingers, holding them still. Phil says nothing. 

“Thank you,” Dan repeats, liberated by its rawness. His guilt burns through onto his skin. Blinding, obvious. 

Phil’s forehead furrows at this but he asks no questions; and Dan casts him a smile gone horribly astray, but Phil looks back, companionable, comforting, fond - always fond. Fingers tightening when the trembling crescendoes, the look Phil casts back is everything Dan doesn’t need: _you’re okay, I know you’re okay, I know you didn’t do this to yourself, whatever this is, it wasn’t you._

 _No_ , Dan thinks, but, knowing this cordiality will last only until morning, he basks in it. 

The ice under Dan’s skin is slowly melting away as heat seeps in, and all he can remember is how all colour and life fell from Sam like flaking skin, gone in seconds, _you should’ve seen it, Phil, how fast it was gone - if you had, you would not say these kind things to me._ His breath catches in his throat. The thought won’t go away; no, instead it intensifies, and a sob wracks his chest. Phil hushes him, the sound rolling from the tip of his tongue, and, carefully, he pulls Dan to him again - Dan’s head on Phil’s shoulder. The temporary nature reposes between them, delicate but breathing, so they have no choice but to nurture it quietly.

“Promise me you’ll shower in the morning,” Phil remarks. 

Dan expels a harsh breath, the closest to a laugh he can get, and nods. “I’m not going to disappear again -”

“That’s not what I meant -”

“-Even if you want me to.” Dan pulls away to look at him, wiping away his tears, and smiles. 

Rolling his eyes, Phil replies, “I was honestly only asking because you stink.”

“Mhm.” Dan deflates, tipping back into the sofa cushions, reminded again of the deed clinging to his skin.

They go quiet. Dan’s breaths sting his chest; the pressure in his head is intermittent. His chest is hollow but peculiarly bloated, as if his lungs are drowning in sterilised water - Dan can feel the fish and lily pads, choking and fattening. Trembling, his hands don’t feel like his own; meanwhile, the stench of his hair and the blur of his vision disorientate him as his vision sways from corner to corner of the room. The world warps in front of his eyes. Each beat of his pulse piles against the place where his hand rests against the other, frantic and weak; he can hear it in his head, the beat of his heart contorting to the thud of bone on floor whenever his brain is freed for more than thirty seconds. He swallows and locks his fingers together.

Next to him, Phil looks rather impassive. Except for the concern he shows every time he looks to Dan - which feels obligatory, anyway, it’s expected - all conflict is swept from his face through the line of his jaw and the shield of his stare - pointed straight forward. His body is relaxed and warm at Dan’s side, his hand tucked around Dan’s waist as if he might fall, but Dan knows Phil well enough by now that behind his eyes, he is deciding how to react to Dan’s sudden reappearance.

“4:58,” says the clock. Phil says nothing. Dan tethers agitation to his breath and exhales; more anxiety undulates from him, but the residue of it remains - in how he thinks, how he holds himself, how he expects the clap of a cataclysm in his ears at any moment.

In the time that passes, he casts his gaze around, thirsting for anything to take his interest as he waits. Ajar, the bedroom door bears the sight of the room behind it: he can see the bed sheets are rumpled and strewn over the bed, a pile of books and cables pushed into a pile in one corner. As for the rest of the apartment, nothing much has changed since Dan was last here: a candle or two have moved, perhaps, and the TV has migrated a few centimetres to the left, leaving imprints in the carpet, but everything is mostly the same. Cracked down the centre, the curtains let in a stream of lamplight, molten amber streaming down in front of them - just out of reach. When the heavens finally give way to the cold, the clouds’ swollen bellies pulled asunder as ice gushes out, the band of gold is flecked with shadow from the snow on the window pane; the colour should be beautiful, but it clashes with the room’s blue tones, and Dan is unsettled, rather than captivated, as he watches the shadows breed and conglomerate, as dirt muddying water. Within minutes, the snow muffles everything; it falls gently, subtly; sound and sight are subdued by its whispers, frozen in an elegiac eternity. A shiver runs down Dan’s spine.

Still, Dan cannot escape thoughts of the murder, ( _the blood, the sigh, the end_.) but it has tired to a dull roar: a constant presence at the back of his mind, a looming shadow that is threatening but not, at this moment, imminent. The snow is too late to wash the grime from his hands, but it opens up a temporary eternity, and Dan would happily be Sisyphus if it meant he could escape the crooked beckoning of the future. 

“Do you think you can sleep now?” Phil asks, unlocking his fingers and tangling them a different way. 

He is still shaken to the foundations, but suddenly he is so tired. His eyes ache to close and his thoughts are syrup; his shoulders slump forward of their own accord. Moments earlier he was too petrified to be alone, but now he longs for rest. 

So he nods, his jaw tremoring, and Phil mirrors him before standing and digging his fingers into his eyes. “I’ll get you a blanket and pillow, then.”

Dan nods again, settling back into the sofa and sighing. 

“Dan, you can at least wash your hands and face,” Phil calls, and Dan looks up from his lap. Squinting to see, he can make out Phil looking at him - studying, or regarding, still impassive - from the other side of the room, and he nods again. He sways himself to standing, and he hobbles over to the kitchen sink, twisting the tap and wiping his face over with the algid water that spurts out. Bracing himself against the worktop, he breathes out once, twice, feeling the drips make rivulets down his cheeks, before seeking out a towel and drying himself down. 

When he turns back to the living room, Phil is behind him, offering a woolen blanket and plump pillow. His face is much more harrowed, now, the bruises under his eyes charred sapphires and his cheeks dulled rubies. Dan could trace every contour of his skull. 

Dan takes the items from Phil’s outstretched arm. Phil’s arm falls away as soon as Dan touches them. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” Phil turns to his room. “You can shower as soon as you want. Even if you’re before me. I’m sure it won’t wake me.” His voice wavers, displaced by a yawn.

Guilt twists in Dan’s stomach. “Sorry.”

Phil ignores him. He fusses with the sofa cushions, throwing them in a pile next to the sofa, picking up Dan’s discarded coat and laying it on the worktop, striding over and flicking the lights, saying, “You know where everything is, don’t you?”

Dan swallows. “Of course.”

“Night, then.”

“Night,” Dan replies, feeling like he has to call or yell, jaw jutted up, in order for it to reach him.

Phil looks back once, and once only; his eyes catch the outside light, the light flaring as he turns and enters his bedroom. The moment is fleeting, but the anguish remains: sharp but blurred, drawing Dan’s attention to his own, slow thrum of pain.

-

When Dan wakes, Phil is hidden behind his open door, curled up on his bed and flicking through a paperback. His face is composed, his body made from calculated angles and comfortable curves, the glare on his glasses masking his eyes. Steam from the kettle has condensed on the tiled section of the kitchen wall. The blanket snaked around Dan’s ankles in the night, so he instinctively kicks it off; he props himself up on his hands - palms pale and freakish, blinking harshly and working out the cricks in his neck.

For a few precious seconds, disorientation swamps Dan - before his memory comes flooding back, and realisation is a rock hitting the cliff of his mind. 

Vicious, the barb of his breath snags the back of his throat. He expels it, and another, deeply, gaze scrabbling at the surroundings; his body pulls into itself: shoulders drawn, chest lifted from the centre toward the ceiling, as if on a kite string. The blanket falls to the floor.

“Phil. Fuck. Phil!” he gasps, but his voice is barely smoke, grotesquely ethereal and eidolic, “what have I done?” This is more directed to himself, not that Phil would be able to hear anyway.

“Dan? Are you awake?” 

“Yeah. I - yeah.” Dan pleads for his racing heart to tire and his limbs to loosen. Swinging his legs round to land on the floor, he hurriedly scrubs at the dirt on his face, for now it feels heavier than lead. He sucks in a breath, holds it tightly, and lets it out slowly, willing for control, for it all to go away, with his eyes shut.

Phil stands and pads through to the lounge, book imprisoned in one hand; Dan twists so his back faces him, aware of the burning red of his face. “So you’ll have that shower now?”

Dan bites into a smile and faces Phil. “Sure.”

“And you’ll talk to me about this?” Phil continues, tentative. 

“After the shower, yeah.” 

Phil nods slowly. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

“You know where- yeah. I’ll be in my- yeah.” Phil dismisses his own words with a wave of his hand, and makes his way back to his bedroom. Dan looks away, and only now notices the pile of clothes - neatly folded, warm and worn - by the foot of the sofa. Phil must have left them there while Dan was still resting. He allows himself a smile, looking back to the closed door of the bedroom. 

Phil’s addled speech surprises Dan slightly, yet he supposes it is understandable. Perhaps the fear in Dan’s eyes startled him, or the reality of the situation unsettled him.

After a few moments, Dan stands, picking up the spare set of clothes Phil left him and clicking the door of the bathroom shut behind him. He swipes the bolt and stands for a few seconds, eyes shut. Beginning to shrug off his clothes, he steps into the shower, paying little care to its temperature.

(Dan wipes off the condensation on the mirror after he steps out, and can’t help but stare at his bruised eyes for a few long moments.)

When he returns to the living room, he finds Phil seated on the sofa, one leg crossed across his lap, the arm that holds his book leaning on the arm of the chair. He eats toast with his spare hand, and doesn’t look up from his book as he does so. Two cups sit, steaming, on the coffee table. Not moving far from the bathroom door, he fidgets with his hands; the steam slips down his back.

Phil looks up. His glasses slip down his nose, and if this were any other time, Dan would point out how he just aged twenty years. “Have a good time?”

Dan steps forward. “Your shower gel is a gross colour,” he says, and the energy it takes to lift his voice, to lighten his tone, siphons all strength from his head. It’s green and lime scented. It looked like slime in his hand, and Dan fretted, stupidly, that the colour would mix with the blood and grime packed into his pores; if it would all congeal at his feet like slaughter and potion. Of course, the colour turned to white froth as soon as he rubbed it on his skin. 

“Dan,” Phil begins, and Dan stares pointedly at his twisted hands, “about last night. You said you’d talk to me once you’d showered, and you have, so.”

“I.” Dan folds his arms, swivelling his feet. He runs his hands down his chest, and the rustle of fabric is so terribly loud. He’s too panicked to have thought this through properly, and the only thing he can think of is - 

“I was high,” he blurts out. Phil frowns, and Dan rushes to keep talking, to smother the silence and the baying questions. “I took some stuff - stuff I haven’t taken before - and I freaked out. It was nothing. I’m sorry.”

Phil’s jaw hangs open, words caught between the frown of his forehead and the caring pinch of his fingers. “Dan -”

“I’m fine.”

“It seemed like more than just drugs, Dan -”

“I’m fine,” Dan cuts him off again, louder. 

Phil presses his hands into his lap, and it makes him smaller. “I thought you didn’t...do drugs?”

“I don’t. It was just...one time. Stress of exams, you know?” Dan sniffs. “It won’t happen again.”

Phil opens his mouth again. The creases of his forehead are sharp and pointed in Dan’s gaze, and he wishes Phil would just look past this and forget everything. 

Dan’s phone goes off. He reaches for it, looks at the message, and his stomach leaps to his throat.

“They need me back at the office.”

He strides across the room, picking up his jacket and tugging it on; Phil stands, objecting, “What, no! We need to talk about this!”

“There’s nothing to talk about. Thank you for being there. I’ll…” He waves his hand in the air. “Message you later?” Phil has no time to reply, and the door bounces on its hinges when it shuts.

-

There’s nothing they can do. Annalise knows what happened, it turns out - she knows what they did, and she’s _helping_ them. For some reason, that terrifies Dan. But it at least means he doesn’t have to fret about what he says and doesn’t, and they don’t have to constantly find new ways to mislead the police and their bloodthirsty tongues. With Annalise on their side, Dan almost feels like he can lean back and relax into the perpetual, inquisitive snapping of the police’s questions; it’s as if life is truly normal again. Or, at least, it’s the chalky skeleton of reality; to which he clings, from which he sags, like sinew looped on each rib. At home, though - at night - not even winter’s frozen plight can dull his frenzied fright. His apartment is empty of people to hear his rearing nightmares.

-

A few days later, Dan turns up on Phil’s doorstep with a case folder tucked under his arm. The weather hasn’t mellowed, and there’s a thin pall of icy water on his jacket.

“Hi,” he greets Phil as the door opens. 

“Hi…” Phil replies, and his gaze flickers to the folder in Dan’s hands.

“Oh.” Dan pulls it out and waves it in front of him. “We need your help. Again. It’ll be just like old times.” He cracks a crooked smile, the folder still held in front of him. Phil looks between the folder and Dan again, and finally, slowly, the smile seeps through. 

“Sure,” he says, and steps aside. “Quick, you’re letting all the heat out.” Dan complies, rolling his eyes, and Phil shuts the door before returning to his laptop and sheets of paper spread out on the table. Dan sits next to him.

“Like you’d be able to tell the difference.” Dan tugs at the thick wool of Phil’s jumper. It’s almost heather in colour, with hints of grey, and the colour slips through Dan’s pale fingers.

Phil pouts. “Heating is expensive.”

“Is that _beige_ , Phil?”

Flicking Dan’s arm, Phil says, “you know damn well that it’s not, Dan.”

“Sure.”

Phil sighs. “What do you want help with?”

“I want you to know this wasn’t my idea,” Dan says, opening the file and extracting a piece of paper. Phil takes it and Dan watches the pattern of his eyes as they study the print.

“So you wouldn’t have come to see me?” 

“Definitely not.”

Phil smiles, but it wavers as he continues to read.

“I would’ve come, but not to give you more work,” Dan admits. “You don’t have anything important you should be doing, do you?”

“Like I ever do.”

Dan knows a compliment from Phil when he hears one, but he says, “you’re right, your work is pointless.”

“You said IT was cool when we first met.”

“You remember that? I certainly don’t.” Dan leans forward and starts rummaging delicately through the paper on the table.

“You _did_ , you said it’s ‘really fucking cool’, in fact.”

“I used expletives?” 

Phil nods, eyes wide. 

“God. That sounds serious. No, that’s just unbelievable, isn’t it?”

Phil laughs, “how is it?”

“Phil, I’d never call IT _cool_ , let alone _fucking cool_.”

“What did you come here for, again? A lesson in manners?”

“Certainly not from you,” Dan huffs. He looks up, and Phil gives him a pointed look, see what I mean. “Right. Sorry. _Please_.”

“I’ll do it, but what do I need to do, Dan.” Phil jostles him, and Dan sits back up to face him.

“Oh! You should’ve said.”

Phil raises his eyebrows, arms crossed and jaw squared, and snatches the rest of the papers from Dan’s hands.

-

“So,” Dan begins. He circles his fingertips across the glass of the table, and looks shyly to Phil. “What happened to the underwear model?”

Phil snorts and doesn’t look back, instead focusing on the code on his computer screen. “He wasn’t an underwear model, stupid.”

“I know.” Dan looks away. “But he could’ve been. That’s why he was around yours,” he suggests, picking up a scrap of paper and starting to fold it in halves. He can see his stringent smile warped in his reflection. 

Phil is quiet, his eyes going to a vase of flowers that are browning at the edges. The ceramic reposes on the windowsill, with the sun bleeding past, and each petal stands out, dark tombstones, against the looming night. Grimacing, he replies, “you’re just being bitter.”

“Can you blame me?” Dan says, before he can stop himself, and the tone slices him in two. 

“You don’t get to be jealous.” The words neither rise nor fall, don’t pitch or whisper or stall: instead, they sit level on a shelf. 

“No,” Dan agrees, but the sound barely chips his teeth - skimming from his tongue and dissipating into the air. Dan cannot tell if Phil heard.

-

“Do you want a drink? I have wine in the fridge,” Phil says as soon as he answers the door. 

Dan steps through, forehead crumpled and lips in a bemused smile, and says, “What’s the occasion?” Phil snakes his hand past Dan’s waist to close the door behind him. Dan shrugs off his coat, shaking the snowflakes from his hair, and Phil walks over to the kitchen, yanking open the fridge and bending over to rummage for the bottle.

“I won the case for you, you’ve finished school for the year…” Phil replies, his voice muffled. He makes a yell of an achievement and retracts his body from the fridge, pulling a bottle of red wine out after him. “What’s there not to celebrate?” He grins wildly, and Dan can only huff a laugh as he places his coat over the arm of the sofa.

“Sure.”

“Good,” Phil says, already pulling out two glasses from the shelf and pouring out the drink. Dan settles down on the sofa and watches, legs curled up to his chest; he shakes his head again, and sees small droplets describe a circle of glistening jewels around him.

Phil looks up from the glasses. “You’re not getting snow on my carpet, are you?”

“It’ll melt.” Dan shrugs. 

“Money’s tight, Howell, and heating is expensive.”

“At least the wine will be chilled, then.”

“Yes,” Phil agrees, precariously carrying the glasses and giving one to Dan before he sits down next to him. “Warm wine is basically grapes, right?”

“No, but sure.” 

Phil rolls his eyes. “To us,” he says, and when Dan doesn’t react, he tugs Dan’s hand forward by the wrist and clinks their glasses together. The sound reverberates, as if bouncing off their chests. Ducking his head, Dan smiles and tips his glass to his lips, and he toasts what could have been; if he hadn't cheated - if he had known it would only take time for him to care, if he had known he could hurt someone - if he hadn't committed murder and gotten away with it. “Also,” Phil adds, “please let my laptop not crash again.”

“I don’t think toasts are for wishes, Phil.”

“Said who?”

Dan leans back into the cushions, sipping slowly at his drink. Phil’s weight dips the space by him and their knees knock. “Fair point, objection overruled.”

Phil looks at him askance. “You’re a lot more agreeable than you once were. What happened?”

Again, Dan shrugs. “Like a fine wine, I improved with age.”

Phil nearly snorts wine out of his nose.

-

“Do you have any biscuits?” Dan asks, halfway through his first glass.

Phil jerks his head towards the cupboards at their shins. “You know where.”

After a moment of looking, Dan uncovers a fresh stash of biscuits - three packets, none opened. He picks one, withdraws, and asks, eager, through the clamp and pull of his grin, “ _Maryland Gooeys_? You still have them?”

“You’re not the only one who likes them, Dan,” Phil points out.

Dan nods, pulling himself together, scolding himself for jumping to conclusions. Feeling Phil’s words as a rock in his gut, his grip on the packet slackens so it swings down onto the table. He tears it open.

(Phil slips him a piece of reassurance, surreptitious like he’s sharing bubblegum: a smile stuck to the lip of the table. Dan unsticks it, the rock dissolving and fizzing until he’s filled with sugar.)

-

“Why did you come back?”

“What?”

A cup or two of wine later, they’re slumped sideways on the seat; their legs cross, as if pinning each other to the sofa in case they fall. The windows are steamed up, the city behind it a hazed reconsideration of nameless roads and the creak of engines, as if the clear-cut lines of the city in daylight are not the real thing but a front for what lies beneath, and the cold and the dark have stripped it back to its heart: clumsy pulses and cursory glances and breathing bodies. The glow of the lamp Phil turned on stopped illuminating the room long ago, barely warming the space around them - so they sit in an island of light, shadow swimming in their sight. With his fingers barely hooked onto his glass, Phil’s cheeks are suffused with a colour similar to the wine in his hand, his hair ruffled and askew where he’s been leaning on the sofa too long. 

The question doesn’t push Dan to react, as such; it is so vague that his fingers hardly tighten on his glass, but the comfort in him withers in his chest instead of blooming. Phil purses his lips; the wayward glint in his eye has subdued to a look of pensive contemplation. 

“You heard me, Dan.” He looks to Dan and smiles, showing that he means no aggression.

“I came back because you’re my friend, Phil,” Dan states, affronted, and he can’t understand why Phil is asking. Surely it is obvious why he returned? Perhaps, before, when he - when he left, it was unclear if Dan ever cared, but now he’s back, why isn’t it obvious to him that Dan obviously appreciates his company. Dan shows this confusion in his voice, but Phil only stares back. 

“No, no no no,” Phil replies, “Like. Why’d you come back when you did? Is it a compliment or an insult that you only returned in an emergency?”

Dan watches the small twister in his glass as he swirls it around, chewing on the side of his cheek. A truck rattles past the window, the sound like bones in hollow skin. “Are we really talking about this now?”

“S’pose so.” Phil doesn’t look away. He taps his nails on the glass.

“Okay,” Dan says - stalling, partly to give himself time to think, partly to evoke a more...elaborated response from Phil. 

“It’s been a long time, Dan.”

“Two weeks is hardly long, Phil.”

“Plus the month or so before that,” Phil says, which, as far as replies go, is not what Dan expected.

Dan wriggles, conflicted. They didn’t talk for that month. Phil kicked him out for that month. _Talking about it_ wasn’t exactly a priority - Dan assumed Phil was glad for that month alone, that Phil wanted him gone. When Dan had offered him excuses and explanations, Phil recoiled like they were rotten meat, and so Dan’s words hung, flaccid and neglected, at his sides until they decayed fully and died. All thought has left him, now. He doesn’t know what he would have said for himself then, nor what he should say now.

That day, Dan had decided Phil was right to decline any excuses. Dan’s words could not resolve his actions. Nothing he felt, or discovered, could change it.

“You didn’t want to see me for that month,” Dan says, hesitantly. “Did you?”

Phil shrugs. 

“ _Phil_.” Dan fixes him with a beseeching look. His blood pounds faster, dozens of heartsease and eyebright pressing their stalks against his skin, weakening the walls around his heart with their weaving, searching roots. He is not angry. He is like Phil, he supposes - tired of waiting. 

“ _Dan_ ,” Phil copies, like the arse he is. Dan wishes he could tell him as such. “I didn’t want to see you, no. But that doesn’t mean an explanation - a way for me to know where I stood with you - wouldn’t have done me good.” He lifts a hand, a way of posing the question _do you see?_ without having to speak his weakness. 

Dan thinks for a short while, picking at a loose thread in his jeans as love’s sharp beak pecks at his conscience. “I was...at one point, I...I went to talk to you. To say sorry. I wanted to admit that I had done wrong, that I had ignored - I was sorry. 

But when I got to yours, he was there -”

“Underwear model,” Phil offers, eyes fizzing - as if smiling, softly. 

“Underwear model was there, and I bottled.”

“I...see,” Phil says.

“I don’t know why that made me run, Phil. Knowing you’d found someone else to make you happy shouldn’t have made me feel unwanted, as if I only wanted to be friends with you as long as I knew you needed me. ‘Cause that’s not me, is it? I’m not here because I need you to worship me.”

“Really?” Phil teases.

“Okay, maybe a little,” Dan concedes. “But that’s all mutual. I don’t feed off your neediness like some beast.”

“Nah, you’re too young and skinny to be a monster,” Phil agrees, prodding Dan’s thigh with his foot.

“Exactly.”

“Underwear model wasn’t as good as validating me as you turned out to be. Like, it took some time to train you, but you learned quickly, once you weren’t using me for my hacking skills.”

“Phil, you don’t have to -”

“No, it’s okay, we can talk about underwear guy.” Phil pushes up with his heels, rearranging his limbs on the seat. “He broke up with me after a few weeks. Old news.”

“Why?”

“To get back with his ex.” Phil raises his eyebrows. “I knew I was his rebound, but I still managed to act surprised when that happened.”

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

“‘S fine, isn’t it? Not your fault.”

“If I’d -”

“Are you gonna say that you’d’ve been able to warn me? Would your bullshit sensors have tingled?”

It isn’t, and they know it, but Dan nods. “Yes.” 

“Sorry you were intimidated by underwear model.”

“Me too.” Dan pushes earnest into it, _I wish I could’ve apologised earlier_.

Phil sighs. “Honestly, Dan, I didn’t think I ever wanted to see you again. I don’t think I could have trusted your apology, or trusted myself with it. Waiting that month, and these two weeks, for us to talk has been hell, yeah, but...Would I have seen that?”

“Phil…” Dan begins, but Phil shakes his head.

“At the start, Dan, I hated you so much. I promised myself I’d never let you back in again,” Phil whispers, soaked with regret and anguish; he lifts his gaze to meet Dan’s slowly, eyes pooling with guilt like it’s too late. Dan’s mouth is clogged with it all, as if bitter juices have burst into his mouth and his tongue is swollen.

This...The matter of affection - the ins and outs, the conflicts and the longings - is pressed between them: jagged rocks, or a bouquet of flowers with the thorns still attached to the stems.

“What about now?”

“Calm down, Dan, this isn’t a westlife song.” And Phil laughs and laughs and laughs - like he needs to - needs to because if he doesn’t, if he stopped, then he’d cry. _And I never cry_ , Phil told him once, plastic cup of wine in one hand and his hip dug into a chair back, _because my body always finds something else for me to do_. He was looking out the window, through the slim gap in the blinds, but he soon turned to Dan. _And sometimes I really need to, you know? But I can’t. I don’t think my body trusts itself_.

Dan tries to laugh with him, but falls back into the clutches of their silence, Phil soon following. Dan tries for a smile, and there is a rumble of pain in his chest. He opens his mouth to prompt Phil to give an answer, but nothing comes out.

“Now…” Phil says. “Now, we’ll just have to wait and see.” 

That’s as bare as the wound will be, Dan recognises; even this small sentence has made the gash weep, and the pain stains Phil’s expression. In spite of his own suffering, though, he sits up and opens his arms wide; Dan readily falls against his chest, holding him tight.

( _What happens when you run out?_ Dan asked. He didn’t get an answer.)

Dan doesn’t know what to read in this - the dusting of fingertips on his shoulder blades, the rise and fall of Phil’s chest against his own that is the steady beat of wings in flight. Phil shows he doesn’t know how he feels about Dan yet. He’s still got reservations about that part of them, but he welcomed Dan into a hug - so perhaps he still distrusts Dan, even if he wishes he didn’t, and Dan gets that. It’s like his chest is crumbling and Dan can’t trust himself either.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Phil says, “and I will hold a grudge.”

Dan huffs, leaning his cheek against Phil’s neck. “Maybe that’ll do you good.”

“Probably,” Phil agrees.

They return comfortably to silence, and then -

“It’s a compliment,” Dan tells him, quietly, as if he’s unsure, even though he knows, in his heart of hearts, that it must be that, for the other option could never suit. Dan kept himself away, and in the casual goings on of normal life, he could cope fine; but when disaster struck, and rock bottom broke him, he went back to Phil as if he had never cut ties. It was not that he had no other alternative, it was because Dan’s first plan was Phil. Phil, whom he could rely on, who could make him feel safe even as the rain poured in. He hadn’t needed to think it through. “I was dumb, and it’s a compliment.”

Eventually, the amount of drink he’s had catches up on him, and the muscles in his back are screaming for relief, so he prises himself away and stands. “I’m going to the loo.” This way, also, he will get a chance to collect his thoughts.

Phil nods. Dan thinks he looks glad for the solitude, too. He can’t take offence from that.

-

There is not much more for him to do, Dan decides, over than keep apologising, and tell himself that he will respect Phil’s decision no matter what he chooses. Because he is the villain here - villains can have fairytale hearts, even if they are, themselves, of story books - and the gavel is in Phil’s hands. Because he cannot make this harder than it already is. The mass of blood on his hands will soon pin him to the ground, it feels like.

-

Dan returns to find Phil curled over himself. The bumps of his spinal cord protrude like gnarls and knots of a tree trunk. Dan hesitates by the door, and finds himself hearing the tattered wheeze of breaths.

“Phil?” He walks around the sofa, and his shadow grows and looms when he steps into the path of the light. Phil’s shoulders are shaking, he’s clearly crying, but he looks up and offers Dan a watery smile as he wipes his eyes. “ _Phil_.” Dan seats himself next to Phil, and tethers his hands together in his lap to fight the urge to loop an arm around Phil’s shoulders. They were hugging just five minutes ago, but Phil wasn’t crying then, and so Dan didn’t have the taste of self-blame stinging his mouth. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong - settles for a gentle bump of arms and quiet, letting time roll out in front of them.

“I’m sorry I kicked you out,” Phil admits, sounding so small that Dan aches to hold him, and the words spin off into another rush of tears. His eyes flit to Dan and away.

Dan’s throat feels like he’s swallowed stinging nettles. “Phil, that wasn’t your fault.”

Phil screws his eyes shut and shakes his head resolutely. “No, it was. You were right, we never said anything abo-about it, and I acted too quickly. It was harsh and unfair and selfish and I - I’m _sorry_ ,” he insists, the last few words choked on a lamenting crescendo.

“Sorry to be typical, but I disagree.”

Phil coughs, and laughs, but says nothing, and the argument is left to rest.

“I’m sorry I cheated on you.” Dan bows his head. Saying that he cheated is a blatant cry against Phil’s decision, and Dan knows it holds more than just defiance - that it suggests that there was something, something important, to cheat on. 

His eyes turn glassy, and through the blur he can see Phil’s bunched hands planted firmly on his lap. They are so close to his own, if only he could reach across and loop them in his. 

A smile splits Phil’s face. “That’s the other reason I’m crying.” He sniffs, a tear slipping off his cheek.

Dan can’t hold him, but he can lean his head against Phil’s. He lets out the noise of sympathy and anguish that curls from his throat. _I wish I could make it up to you_ , but his thoughts cannot breach the gap that has opened, gaping and sore, between them.

-

Dan goes home for winter break, and they spend their time apart slowly building their friendship back up, until it takes a form Dan can remember. The contents differ, maybe, but the outline is the same.

-

“Sorry, am I meant to know you?” Phil asks when he opens the door for Dan. Dan pushes past him and throws himself onto a chair, saying, “fuck off.” He sits horizontally on it, so his legs are swung over the arm, his head tucked in the fold between the back and the other arm.

Phil laughs. “How was your break?” The woolen sweater he’s wearing sits easily on the slope of his neck.

“Fine.”

“They took in the stray, then.”

Dan sighs. “They always do.”

“They should probably stop doing that. It can’t be good, economics wise.”

“I know, right,” Dan replies, matching Phil’s concerned tone.

Phil grins again. “I’m joking.”

“I know.” Dan pulls a neatly wrapped package from his bag, throwing it at Phil so it hits the cushion by his head and falls down onto the seat beside him. “I got you something.”

“A hit to the head?” Phil inquires, picking up the parcel by the ribbon and dangling it in front of his face.

“That’s for calling me a stray,” Dan explains, glaring at him. 

“And a present,” Phil continues, nodding understandingly. 

“For taking in the stray.”

“Of course.” The present continues to dangle, and swings back and forth.

“You can open it, you twat.”

“I know,” Phil assures him, which means he’s just stalling so that he can annoy Dan. Which is fine. Dan flips him off, because he knows how to assert himself. Phil can wait all he wants.

Finally, Phil unties the ribbon and prises off the wrapping paper. Next, he takes out the hat and holds it in his hands.

“My gran made it,” Dan explains. “I couldn’t pull it off, but I have faith in you.”

“A faith that’s rightly placed, I assure you. So, this is a hand-me-down gift?”

“Not at all! It was made for you, look.” With an overplayed grunt of effort, he swivels around and stands; taking the hat from Phil’s fingers, he places it on Phil’s head, smoothing it down. “See! A perfect fit.”

“Dan.”

Dan yanks the hat down over Phil’s eyes. “Now, c’mon, I have a table booked.”

“What?”

“A table, for dinner. Did you really think that hat would be my gift?”

Phil pulls off the beanie with two pinched fingers, and starts weaving it through his fingers. “Dan, what are you doing?”

“Taking you out for decent food?” Dan looks up from where he’s zipping up his coat.

“Yes, but why?” Phil persists, exasperated.

“Because I haven’t seen you in two weeks, and I want to spend time with you?” Dan frowns. “You might want to keep that hat on, by the way, it’s fucking zero degrees out there.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. I have a series rented and it expires today.”

“Okay…” Dan starts taking off his coat. “I’ll cancel that table, then.”

Phil nods. “Sorry.”

Dan dismisses him with a wave of his hand. “Can I...stay?”

Phil huffs. “Fine. But you have to stay your end of the couch.”

“Deal.”

“And you’re not allowed to laugh at what I’ve rented.” Phil ignores the bounce as Dan plonks himself down again, instead fiddling with the remote for the TV.

“Why would I lau - um, Phil? Phil Lester?”

Phil hides his face in his hands, and moans in embarrassment. “What?”

“Is that - sorry, but is that _Buffy? Buffy the Vampire Slayer_?” Dan gibes him easily, the false level of misunderstanding making Phil pout and flush.

“What did I tell you!” he exclaims. Dan barely dodges the cushion thrown at his head. Clutching his stomach, he falls back from the shock of laughter that courses through him, staining his cheeks red and making his jaw ache. Phil pulls his face into a firm frown, but gives into a wide grin by the time he turns his attention back to the screen. Dan watches him a moment as his mirth dissipates, feeling the gentle, curious fizzing in his belly.

-

Dan suggests _Buffy_ to the group a few days later. They don’t understand - which is rude, quite frankly. With his whole side pressed against Phil’s as he works, Dan recounts this, the disdain drawn out and the gestures broad and alive. Phil laughs into his shoulder.

(Meanwhile, Dan can’t bring himself to trust Annalise or the others again. Not even Asher, whose bumbling, foolish mind could stumble upon reality all too suddenly. The huddling and scheming is much rarer, now, and the police have backed off for the moment; the future is unknown but promising - if haunted. Yet, he disapproves of the heart-to-hearts Laurel urges them to have. Dan’s fate slips between their palms as it is, and he cannot disclose more of him, cannot slice off his secrets to hand to them as if it’s impossible that they may drop them. Secrets are slippery, and once they fall, they do not stop sliding away.

-

The lights in the apartment are set low, so the room is barely suffused with colour. Phil stands at the sink, wrist-deep in soapy water, peering over his shoulder every so often to talk to Dan.

“Not gonna lie,” Dan says, bracing one palm against the counter as the other hand twiddles a wine glass, the last of it pooling and slipping down the glass with the movement. “I’ve been looking forward to _Buffy_ all week.”

“Yeah?” Phil puts a plate on the side and it clatters on the surface.

“Obviously.”

“I thought it was awful?” Phil looks over his shoulder and shoots Dan a sly look.

“Oh, it is, but I need to find out if they survive. I can’t deal with these cliff hangers, Phil, and I’m blaming you.”

“I accept full responsibility.” Phil nods to the growing pile of cutlery. “Can you start drying those?”

Dan lets go of the wine glass and crosses his arms. “I don’t know, I’ve been subjected to so much awful treatment I don’t think I should -”

Phil kisses him. It’s almost like before, but passed time lingers there, and Dan freezes up at the surprise of it all. Phil’s hands go to his neck, and cold, soapy water drips down Dan’s back, forming a chimera with the warmth that blossoms there. The realisation stirs in his chest; a fluttering, baffled, immolating thing, an occlusion of heartsease with forceful roots. Dan’s hands, prised from between their bodies, balance on Phil’s hips, and he starts to press back against him, tiny supernovas peppering the vacuum in his chest. 

Phil pulls back. Steps back and turns his back. He shakes his hands dry, and soap suds fly everywhere. “Stop doing that.”

Dan brushes the water from his neck, feeling his cheeks flush red. “Er, _you_ kissed _me_?”

“Exactly.” Phil continues to shake his hands violently, head tilted to the ceiling. “God. Oh, God.”

“Phil?” Dan blanches, because, as post-kiss conversations go, that’s not exactly what he wants to hear. 

Phil turns to him, sighing, and looks at him with a vulnerable expression, his eyes wide and his conviction torn. “I shouldn’t have done that.” He turns away again. “I should _not_ have done that.”

“Phil, calm down, it’s okay,” Dan attempts, his hands offered out in front of him. “It’s fine.”

“You don’t understand.”

The washing up is still in the sink, the bubbles crackling as they disappear. 

Dan doesn’t know what he doesn’t understand, but he figures it isn’t wise to ask. Instead, he speaks his mind, trying to draw the panic out of Phil and finally fix what he broke. “If - if _you_ want, Phil, I want this to work. You’re important to me, I -”

“It’s more than that! For me!” Phil interrupts. He wrings his hands in his top. “Fuck. You have guys falling at your feet, Dan, I’ve seen it. But I don’t. You - I thought you were special, that you looked at me twice. I’d found someone who picked me over everyone else. You could have the world, Dan, and you chose me. I thought that, at least. I knew you used me, at first, but then you came back. I _really thought_ -” He cuts himself off and lets his hands go slack in the crumpled material of his shirt. He looks at Dan. “And then you left.”

The knife twists in Dan’s stomach, and part of him wishes he were still lying in Annalise’s house, face to face with death, so that he wouldn’t have to look at Phil, whose eyes are not cold and vacant, but warm, burning, and so alive with hurt. 

He thinks for a moment, then says, “You weren’t a second thought for me. By the end. I really did grow to care for you, so much. That wasn’t a lie, I promise. But I wasn’t used to that, I tried to ignore it. He -” Say his name. “James wasn’t a replacement, or a better, or anything to me at all. A necessity, for my job; a link to the old me. Maybe.

“Truth is, I will never understand why I did that. But I mean it when I want us to - I want us.” Taking a step forward, he fights to keep his expression open; he will feel the pain, if only so Phil can see him truly.

Phil considers him, and he looks like he’s about to cry. “No, that doesn’t change anything. How can I trust you? If you’re scared of me?”

“Not you. Never you.” The sorrow is a scar, astringent, long felt, long feared. 

“I don’t know how else I’m meant to look at this.”

“That I’m an idiot? I know I fucked up, and I could never forget that. I don’t expect you to, either.”

Phil shakes his head, biting his lip. “It’s not the cheating. We never agreed on that. It’s like...I can’t know you, Dan. You say you care, but how did you have room for him in your heart if you already had me? I can’t be that much of a deal. To you. But you are to me, and I can’t let myself fall for this if you’re never going to be as far in as I am.”

“You’re wrong.” Dan clears his throat. 

Phil’s eyes are imploring - imprisoned in shadowed iron bars. “How?”

“Sometimes my heart is so full with you, it feels like I’ll be consumed by it.”

Phil gives a wry smile. “Poetry can’t save you, Howell.”

“I know, I know.” The faint nod to their previous dynamic gives Dan the confidence he needs to reach forward. He leaves his hand between them, palm up and fingers half-fledged. “But I can save myself. I can change and improve. You can save yourself.”

Phil cocks an eyebrow. “‘Save’?”

“Well,” Dan concedes. “You can choose.”

After a moment, Phil puts out his hand and places it in Dan’s. Dan’s fingers curl over it, holding it in place. Neither of them move, but Dan makes eye contact and smiles his thanks. 

“I don’t think I could ever want to hurt you,” Dan continues.

“Nor I you.”

“James wasn’t - I didn’t know I had the power to hurt you. I’m oblivious like that.”

“Very oblivious,” Phil amends, squeezing his hand slightly. 

“I’m used to people using me for my body, not for me. I thought you were the same; that’s not an excuse, by any means, but what I’m trying to say is, I know now.”

“Okay.”

“So can we…?”

“We’ll see.” Phil looks down to their entwined hands, and starts swinging them to and fro. 

“I can wait,” Dan affirms. It’s becoming clear how much both of them are going to grow and develop, still, before they understand each other and how they work. And that’s okay, he thinks, as long as they don’t spend that time basking in animosity.

Smiling at him, Phil steps forward so that their hands must loosen and fall, and kisses him sweetly before hugging him. Dan breathes in deeply, and blinks hard to free the beading tears in his eyes. The ice water has long since warmed on his back; it finally feels like nothing else is kept between them - no secrets or anxiety rotting in the air - and when they hold each other, it is as tightly as they can.

-

Dan can’t stay, he has revision and work to do, but Phil drives him to his apartment.

(“How will I get my car?” Dan argued, when Phil offered.

“The walk will do you good,” and Phil’s grin betrayed his jest.)

The prints of the city fall through the windscreen onto their laps: swirls of red at the traffic lights, bloated circles of lamplight when the snow melts on the glass, distended seas of green and blue. The stained glass sends colour bowing and bending on the altar of the dashboard. Dan watches the flow of them as Phil drives. Phil is humming along to a song, and Dan is so enamoured he forces himself to look away; he entertains himself with the view out of the passenger window. Love presses its face against the glass so its nose is aligned with Dan’s, so they would be touching if not for the glass, and Dan cannot see anything else. And it stares at him. Dan looks back, and studies - and he knows it.

When they pull up outside, they embrace again over the gear sticks; the red cord coils in his chest. They don’t quite pull away, afterwards. Their foreheads rest against each other, and Phil whispers, “Stay. I want you to hear the end of this song.”

And Dan doesn’t have anything to run away from right now, locked away in this moment with halos of gold branding his cheeks, so Dan lets Phil hold onto his upper arms, lets himself slowly fall forward until he’s resting his head on Phil’s shoulder. The song hums in the background, swelling like a beating heart inside the car but never seeming to leave it. Phil rocks them back and forth slowly, (Dan laughs, accepting he cannot hide all the happiness growing inside him, and he is made of calm), taking the rhythm and stretching it out down their spines; so that the movement is slight, gradual, settling on their cheeks as their hair is nudged into their eyes.

“I still think your music is too chill. You need to broaden your horizons and liven up a bit, old man.” Phil merely hums back, trailing one thumb down Dan’s arm without catching the skin. 

The song closes. “Will you let me go now?” Dan asks. “This is quite uncomfortable.” His waist aches, and his spine is smarting, glowing metal, but it feels correct, redolent of something yet to come: fragrance and heat, and a trust they will fight to earn. The mire has left them heavy, and littered with cuts and blemishes. And they will heal. 

This, he knows.

Phil’s mouth is right beside his ear, and he can almost feel the reeling spin of his smile. It is like there is no sadness left, no acidic dregs of the words that tore them apart. _It is good to pretend_ , Dan thinks, _and wait for it to leave of its own accord_. “We’ll see.”


End file.
